From the December 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
To our eyes, the floral paintings of Rachel Ruysch might look merely decorative. But, as curator Bernd Ebert explains, they encapsulate the economic and scientific advances of the early modern Netherlands.
As a genre, floral still lifes may seem decorative, harmless, even staid. But in the right hands, they can be rife with mischief, trickery and sleight of hand. Take Still Life of Exotic Flowers on a Marble Ledge (1735) by the Dutch painter Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750). The eye is drawn to the devil’s trumpet that shoots diagonally up across the canvas, or its bold twin, which bares its face to the viewer beneath some scarlet campsis. But look at the butterfly that hovers near a carrion flower at the bottom left of the painting. What is it doing near a plant that in reality is far too pungent to invite anything but flies? And dimly visible in the background is a classical statue in a landscape setting – is that a real landscape, or a painting within a painting?
The answers lie in the changing nature of still-life painting in the 18th century – and in the genius of Rachel Ruysch. Born in Amsterdam to Frederik Ruysch, an eminent professor of botany and anatomy, and Maria Post, the daughter of the influential architect Pieter Post, Ruysch was exposed to art and science from an early age. But in the late 17th century the two fields were not so separate: all scientists were drawing if not also painting, and budding artists such as Ruysch were documenting plants, copying from nature detail by tiny detail.
From a young age, Ruysch was remarkably self-assured. She began her career in 1681, when she was 17, and if you look at her signature from around that time, it’s huge. Full of calligraphic elan, it announces, ‘I am Rachel Ruysch. I am here.’ Her self-confidence was matched by her talent. In 1685, the Amsterdam poet Hieronymus Sweerts wrote a paean to the painter that suggested that her artistry surpassed that of not only Maria van Oosterwijck (1630–93), the most successful woman painter of floral still lifes in the late 17th-century Netherlands, but also Willem van Aelst (1627–83) – Ruysch’s teacher, and the most renowned still-life painter in Amsterdam.
Frederik Ruysch paid Van Aelst enormous sums to train Rachel and her sister Anna. This was an expensive decision – most women at the time were trained by family members, not professional teachers – and seemingly not a wise one, since the fact that the sisters could never be part of the Amsterdam artists’ guild, the Guild of Saint Luke, limited their career prospects.
Still Life of Exotic Flowers on a Marble Ledge (1735; detail), Rachel Ruysch. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. Photo: Rick Andersen; courtesy Nelson-Atkins Media Services
The sisters were expected, by the standards of the time, to marry and take care of the family. And though this was the path they both followed, marriage proved no impediment to Rachel’s productivity. In one work from the early 18th century, her husband, the portraitist Juriaen Pool, depicts himself standing behind Ruysch: one arm leans on an armchair, the other gestures to one of his wife’s still lifes in the background. For a husband to stand behind his wife, supporting her, is exceptional for the period. In all regards, Ruysch confounds our idea of female painters in the late 17th century.
She was a Fijnschilder – an artist who painted with extreme precision, sometimes using a brush that had only one or two hairs. It’s so realistic that you can hardly see the brushstrokes. Ruysch worked in this way until the day she died, but that isn’t to say that she didn’t evolve. Around 1700, Ruysch changed her style, incorporating more complicated structures and experimenting with depth and colour. By this point, most of Ruysch’s rivals in the art market – Van Aelst, van Oosterwijck, Otto Marseus van Schrieck (c. 1613–78), Jan Davidsz. de Heem (1606–84) – were dead. As a result, Ruysch could command truly outrageous prices for her flower paintings. In 1711, one cloth merchant from Leiden paid her 1,300 guilders for two pendant paintings – paintings that come in pairs, in this case a fruit still life and a floral still life. Similar commissions would net most of her contemporaries no more than 20 guilders.
Ruysch did have one great rival: Jan van Huysum (1682–1749). Early in his career, he had drawn inspiration from her; by the 1720s, the tables had begun to turn. A private collector and a dealer had suggested to van Huysum that he try using more pastel colours, with lighter backgrounds, to cater to changing tastes; he took their advice and became the poster boy for still lifes with French rococo stylings. Ruysch, ever the canny operator, took a leaf out of van Huysum’s playbook and began making her own work brighter, painting Flowers in a Terracotta Vase, with its full pale peonies, in 1723.
Then Ruysch won the lottery. The Ruyschs had played the Dutch state lottery before, in 1713, and won 200 guilders – the approximate equivalent of a workman’s annual salary at the time. But in 1723, Ruysch and her husband hit the jackpot, reaping 75,000 guilders – the equivalent of millions of euros today. It may be for this reason that Ruysch is known to have painted only two works between 1723 and 1735: she felt able to more or less retire and raise her four surviving children.
A butterfly approaches a carrion flower in Still Life of Exotic Flowers on a Marble Ledge (1735) by Rachel Ruysch. Photo: Rick Andersen; courtesy Nelson-Atkins Media Services
But in 1735 she completed Exotic Flowers on a Marble Ledge, and few artistic comebacks are as magnificent. It was recognised as a masterpiece at the time, valued in 1745 at 750 guilders. It took Ruysch three or four years to execute, and she was 70 or 71 when she completed it – quite an age, but only the starting point of the latter part of her career. The background is worth noting: the garden, with its classical statue of indeterminate identity, is so dim as to seem barely real. But unusual though this was, it is Ruysch’s depiction of the flowers that was truly sensational.
To understand why viewers would have been bowled over by this painting, it’s worth considering the role of floral still lifes in the 18th-century Netherlands. For one thing, they were not intended to be decorative. Science, on the cusp of Enlightenment, was moving forward. There were discoveries both cosmic, with advances in telescope design, and microscopic: Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the father of microbiology, was active in Delft in the early 18th century.
There were a number of collectors who collected natural specimens and were avidly interested in the small details of nature. The Netherlands was in economic decline: it was at war with England and France, and the art market was suffering accordingly. But still-life flower painting was one of the few kinds of art still in high demand. Amsterdam, which had surpassed Antwerp as the main harbour of the Low Countries, remained a hub of economic, political and imperial activity, and the mayor of the city would instruct the executives of the Dutch East India Company and West India Company to bring back plants and insects from foreign climes so that they could be inspected and cultivated or made to reproduce in the Netherlands – for collection and for sale. The result was the Botanical Garden in Amsterdam, which became so huge a home for non-native plants that it was moved from the centre of the city to the suburbs. Meanwhile, Ruysch’s father, who served as the head of the Botanical Garden, turned his own horticultural collection into a kind of museum. People paid to come and see his specimens, making the Ruysch abode one of the most popular tourist attractions in the city.
Women artists were drawn to floral still lifes: they were not permitted to paint nudes and they could not be members of what is now the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague, making it hard for them to hone their history-painting skills. But constrained to flower painting, they could really make an impression. Their customers were wealthy and educated, and often collected specimens and books of science. The symbolism of individual flowers in art may have been important until the 1650s, but when Ruysch was painting, it was not the meaning of the plants that was important, but their origin. Where did they come from? Today, the tulip seems nothing special – you can buy it at any supermarket. But at the time, tulips, in all their many varieties, were fascinating to people.
Three devil’s trumpets encircle a flame lily beneath some scarlet campsis and a snail vine flushed with indigo in Still Life of Exotic Flowers on a Marble Ledge (1735) by Rachel Ruysch. Photo: Rick Andersen; courtesy Nelson-Atkins Media Services
Exotic Flowers on a Marble Ledge is typical of Dutch still lifes of its period in its realism: it is painted so neatly that you think Ruysch must have had a bouquet of flowers in front of her. But, as in other paintings of the time, it’s a trick – a collage of fictions. These plants did not bloom at the same time of year and did not come from the same region, or even the same continent. The campsis, for example, came from the east coast of the United States; just a couple of flowers to the right is a chinaberry, also known as a Persian or Indian lilac, which, despite these names, is more commonly found in Australasia. Right of the campsis and below the chinaberry is a luscious snail vine, white flushed with indigo, native to South America; just beneath it is a flame lily – its modest binomial Gloriosa superba – which is the national flower of Zimbabwe. And of course, there’s that intrepid butterfly, which in reality would never approach that carrion flower with such curiosity.
Today’s viewers will not notice that: they’ll see the beautiful butterfly and not realise it’s sniffing at the wrong plant. But for Ruysch and her clients, it was all a bit of a game. She was painting it ‘wrong’ on purpose: her well-read customers would have had a great time pointing out all the inconsistencies. So still lifes were not decorative arts; they were an extension of an increasingly empirical – and imperial – mindset. Exotic Flowers on a Marble Ledge features no fewer than 36 species from around the world, a dazzling array unrivalled by any other still-life painter.
The work could have sprung only from the Ruysch family, and it was among the family that it held a particular significance. Ruysch’s father died in 1731; shortly afterwards, she began work on the painting, probably in remembrance of him. It is likely that she was painting after real life in the Botanical Garden of which Frederik was the head, using sketches and books of rare plants available at the garden and in her father’s collection. Though the colours are brighter than in her earlier work, it doesn’t seem quite as decorative; there is a little more brown in the palette, befitting the painting’s sombre raison d’être. The painting remained in the family; it was not for sale.
Throughout the 1740s – until her last known painting, in 1748 – Ruysch’s paintings grew smaller and her backgrounds grew ever lighter. By this time she was not just signing her name but writing her age: 81, 83 and so on. She was rightly proud that she was still producing such outstanding pieces. But she would never top the splendour of Exotic Flowers on a Marble Ledge. In 1749, the year before Ruysch’s death, the Dutch poet Sara Maria van der Wilp plainly captured the strength of the work: ‘This flower painting, more permanent than spring blossoms, may keep its beauty without wilting. It lives on even through strong frost. No storm of strong winds can ever diminish its sparkling glow.’
Looking again at the profusion of colour, the triumphant oleander and that thrusting Devil’s trumpet, it’s hard to disagree.
Still Life of Exotic Flowers on a Marble Ledge (1735), Rachel Ruysch. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. Photo: Rick Andersen; courtesy Nelson-Atkins Media Services
As told to Arjun Sajip.
Bernd Ebert is chief curator of Dutch and German baroque painting at the Alte Pinakothek, Munich.
‘Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art’ is at the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, until 16 March 2025.
From the December 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.