Little is known of the biography of Adam de Coster (1586 in Mechelen - 4 May 1643 in Antwerp).
Born in 1586 in the Flemish city of Mechelen, a province of Antwerp, he appears to have spent much of his career in Antwerp and became a Master of the Guild of Saint Luke around 1607.
His portrait was reproduced as an engraving in Anthony van Dyck's🎨 Iconography, where he was described as "pictor noctium", signaling that his reputation as a painter of night scenes had firmly been established in Northern Europe by the 1630s.
Although documentary evidence only ever records de Coster outside of Antwerp in 1635 when he visited Hamburg, Nicolson has noted that correspondences between his paintings and the works of the Lombard artist Antonio Campi suggest a possible sojourn to Italy.