Floris Arntzenius (1864–1925) was born Pieter Florentius Nicolaas Jacobus Arntzenius on 9 June 1864 in Surabaya, on the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies. As a boy he was sent to the Netherlands to continue his education, and in Amsterdam he studied at the Rijksakademie alongside Isaac Israëls and Willem Witsen.
He settled in The Hague, where he became a member of the artists’ society Pulchri Studio in 1892. At first he painted landscapes in the manner of the Hague School, but he soon found his true subject in the city itself: busy streets, shop windows and canal-side corners, often in rain or lamplight, with their wet pavements and figures hurrying past. He is counted among the younger generation of the Hague School, and his freer touch places him between that school and Dutch Impressionism.
From about 1910 Arntzenius ran a studio with pupils and worked mostly on portrait commissions. He died of tuberculosis in The Hague on 16 February 1925, aged 60.