Bonaventura Peeters the Elder was christened on 23rd July 1614 as the son of Cornells Peeters and Catharina van Eelen in Antwerp in the Church of Saint Walburga. He was the head of a family dedicated to naval and landscape painting. Nothing is known about his education, only his entry as a master into the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke in the fiscal year of 1634/35 is documented. With his brother Gillis Peeters I, a landscape painter and two years his junior, he shared a workshop in Antwerp in which the third brother, Jan Peeters, had also learned in 1641/42. Bonaventura Peeters seems to have spent the last years of his life together with Jan and his sister Catharina, who was also a painter, in Hoboken, not far from Antwerp. He died there on 25th July 1652 and was buried in the church of Hoboken.
