RUYSCH, Rachel

The main line of eighteenth-century Dutch still-life painting is represented by the Amsterdamers Rachel Ruysch and Jan van Huysum, who both specialized in elaborate flower and fruit pictures. They were the most popular still-life painters of the period; their works commanded high prices and were found in famous collections throughout Europe, and their colourful paintings still have wide appeal. The status they were accorded in their time indicates there were powerful patrons and collectors who took exception to the teachings of academic theorists who minimized the significance of still-lifes by placing them at the lower end of the hierarchy of kinds of painting.

In the hands of Rachel Ruysch and Jan van Huysum Dutch flower pieces brighten up again. Their technical perfection and love of minute detail recall the still-lifes painted a century earlier by Bosschaert and his followers, and like their predecessors they did not hesitate to include flowers of different seasons in their arrangements. However, neither Ruysch nor van Huysum arranges blooms into evenly lit symmetrical bunches in the way that early-seventeenth-century painters did, and their lively chiaroscuro effects and delightful ornateness show an unmistakable affinity with Late Baroque and Rococo art.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 7 minutes):

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker, ballet suite, op. 71, Waltz of the Flowers

Ruysch’s flowers seem to glow with inner light, even as their gently wilted petals and overgrown blossoms exhibit the passage of destructive time.

The realism of Ruysch’s flower pieces is deceptive because the opulent arrangement could never have existed in nature. The various flower specimens blossomed in different seasons. Only in the imagination could they ever be assembled into a bunch.

This is an early work by the artist. These works owed much to Willem van Aelst for their composition and motifs. This painting features one of the flowers Van Aelst showed the most frequently, the pink cabbage rose, in the lower part of the bouquet, in bud, in full bloom, and beginning to wilt.

Ruysch regularly populated her floral compositions with butterflies, caterpillars, and other tiny creations.

Ruysch regularly populated her floral compositions with butterflies, caterpillars, and other tiny creations.

Rachel Ruysch, closely following Otto Marseus van Schrieck, also painted forest still-lifes. This painting is a particularly good example. As in van Schrieck’s still-lifes, we look at dark undergrowth, dried stump with knotholes surrounded by toadstools and moss underneath stones. Winding around the dead tree trunks are brightly coloured flowers of all kinds, including roses, lilies and bindweed. They have a luminous quality which seems to come from within them. Insects, reptiles, and amphibians such as snakes, toads and small lizards, are partly fighting one another and partly destroying the plants together. On the left a toad and a small snake are attacking one another, on the right a fire-breathing (!) toad with red flames darting from its mouth is trying to hold a small lizard in check.

Opposing the world of half-dead, flowerless plants and minerals, the glowing colours of the flowers add an element of vitality. These must be understood with a view to the Christian doctrine of salvation, symbolizing the purity of the Virgin Mary as well as Christian virtues or fruit of the Holy Spirit. This is also the context for the butterflies settling on the unopened blossom of a lily - undoubtedly an allusion to the mystical (‘immaculate’) conception of the Virgin Mary, as the lily had been a fixed attribute of the Mother of God since the late Middle Ages. Other insects, by contrast, are interpreted in a negative way. The locust climbing from the dead tree trunk to the red rose in order to destroy it, together with the stag beetle on the branch above it, just below the upper frame must be seen as an allusion to biblical text: ‘He spoke and the locusts came, locusts and beetles without number…’.

Nature in all its appetitive instinct slithers, licks, and chews, but discreetly around the white peaches’ scented and immaculate delicacy. Ruysch was the daughter of a professor of anatomy and botany and the granddaughter of an architect. A pupil of Willem van Aelst, she was also intrigued by Otto Marseus van Schrieck’s paintings with reptiles.

This signed and dated painting depicts a still-life with marigolds, morning glory, a passion flower and other assorted flowers, together with insects on a stone ledge.

This picture shows a still-life of flowers with a nosegay of roses, marigolds, larkspur, a bumblebee and other insects.

This painting depicts a still-life of roses, tulips, a sunflower and other flowers in a glass vase with a bee, butterfly and other insects upon a marble ledge. It epitomises the final and grandest stage of Dutch flower-painting of the Golden Age, of which Rachel Ruysch was one of the finest protagonists.

The artist’s father, Frederick Ruysch, was a celebrated professor of botany and anatomy, his wunderkammern a popular destination for visiting dignitaries. Access to such curiosity cabinets of preserved specimens would have enabled careful examination of insects and moths which Rachel Ruysch executes with scientific precision in paintings such as this one.

Unlike that of most 17th and 18th century female artists, Rachel Ruysch’s work has never sunk into obscurity. She also enjoyed public recognition of her talent during her lifetime: in 1701, three years before painting this particularly charming bouquet, she was the first woman to be admitted to the Confrerie Pictura in The Hague, and in 1708 Johann Wilhelm, the Elector of the Palatinate, appointed her to the position of court painter. The artist’s specialities were compositions with fruit, flowers and woodlands. Within this genre she was never a real innovator, but she perfectly assimilated the work of others, equalling them in terms of her painting technique. At least for certain partial aspects of flower painting she sought her own solutions, thereby imposing her own stamp on her creations. During the final decade of the 17th century we can observe the influence in particular of her teacher, Willem van Aelst, and that of Simon Pietersz. Verelst. From the beginning of the 18th century she was inspired by Jan Davidsz. de Heem and Abraham Mignon.

The use of a dark background for a bouquet is a tried and tested way of bringing colours and shapes to their own. The fact that very few flowers in the bouquet cross also shows that the painter wished to present the various species in a way that made them clearly recognisable. This almost scientific trait is certainly due, in Ruysch’s case, to her father’s position as a professor of botany. Typical for this period is the adding of insects and fruit of every kind, here a branch of plums. This fruit with its characteristic matt, bluish tint, which is so difficult to reproduce, appears to have been chosen by painters precisely in order to demonstrate their technical skill. One striking feature of this sumptuous bouquet is the S-shapes in the composition, with which Ruysch seeks a more natural-looking structure in contrast to the strong diagonals found in her earlier work. Rachel Ruysch’s personality also speaks to our imagination: although building a professional career was something unusual for a woman at that time, she was simultaneously a “normal” woman of her time, as she bore ten children.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 2 minutes):

Franz Schubert: Blumenlied (Flower Song) D 431

Ruysch was the preeminent painter of flower still-lifes - her draftsmanship, brushwork, and handling of colour were unmatched.

This luscious sample of life on Earth represents at least two passions of its time: taxonomy (or categorization) and still-lifes, which emphasize the pleasure of the senses and their ephemerality. Ruysch was court painter to the elector palatine Johann Wilhelm, who gave this painting and its pendant to his father-in-law, Cosimo III de’ Medici.

Ruysch’s works at the end of the seventeenth century are characterised by their soft light, harmonious colours and gentle, elegant composition. This painting is signed lower right: Rachel Ruysch.