Geer van Velde (1898-1978) was a Dutch-French painter whose long career carried him from difficult beginnings in the Netherlands to a distinguished place within the École de Paris. Born in Lisse in the Netherlands, van Velde and his older brother Bram, also a painter of note, endured genuine misery and abject poverty during their childhood after their father abandoned the family. This early hardship shaped both brothers and helped forge the artistic bond that would last for the rest of their lives.

After being apprenticed to the decorating firm of Schaijk and Eduard H. Kramers, Geer moved to Paris to join his brother, arriving at the vibrant French capital at a moment when the international artistic community there was reshaping the direction of modern art. Initially he was influenced by the Russian-born French artist Marc Chagall, one of the pioneers of modernism and among the greatest figural painters of the twentieth century. Under Chagall's early influence, van Velde painted subjects drawn from nature, but he soon began to experiment with works that explored the relationships between abstract geometric shapes, gradually developing the more reductive vocabulary that would define his mature career.

Geer always remained very close to his older brother Bram, and an exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon in 2010 explored how the two brothers influenced each other through their different and diverging artistic pursuits. Together their work reflected the aesthetic issues that confronted and revolutionized art in pre-war and postwar Europe, and both brothers formed part of the École de Paris, the loose international community of painters whose work defined much of European modernism during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Both were intensively influenced by the Cubist movement, and this Cubist foundation would remain fundamental to Geer's practice throughout his life, never fully abandoned as he continued to develop and refine his personal artistic voice.

Van Velde's paintings are held today in the Centre Pompidou, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and other major international collections, where they remain valued examples of the École de Paris tradition at its most cultivated.