Rachel Ruysch’s Impossible Still Lifes Outsold Rembrandt—Now They Star in a Major Museum Show

She was the queen of the 17th-century still life—and her patrons shelled out lavish sums to own her resplendent flowers. Rachel Ruysch, born in the Hague in 1664, rose to fame for her exquisitely detailed still lifes. Hers were gorgeous and unreal bouquets of flowers that could only exist in art; she placed blossoms that bloomed in different seasons, side-by-side, in painted perpetuity. 

The daughter of the famed botanist Frederik Ruysch, Ruysch grew up in a home surrounded by plants and flowers, often painting specimens in her father’s office. As an artist, she combined her passions for art and science to bring her impossible and yet enthralling detailed visions to life.  

A remarkable talent, she was, in the early decades of the 17th century, regarded by many as Holland’s most famous painter. So great was her celebrity that, unlike many women artists of her era, Ruysch was never fully blotted out from the art historical canon, but, instead, erroneously cast as a minor rather than a major art historical figure.  

“She’s an exceptionally talented artist. Her renderings of nature are just absolutely wonderful. It’s a level of detail, precision, and technical mastery that is truly extraordinary,” said curator Robert Schindler, in a recent conversation. “You can situate her in this environment of the late 17th century and early 18th century at the intersection between art, nature, and science.” 

Now, centuries later, Ruysch is finally stepping back into the limelight with “Rachel Ruysch: Nature Into Art” the first monographic exhibition of her work. The exhibition, curated by Schindler, opened at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio earlier this week. The TMA is a fitting venue for the exhibition as the first North American institution to collect her work back in 1956 (that painting is here reunited with its pendant for the first time since 1848). The traveling exhibition originated at the Alte Pinakothek Munich late last fall and will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston later this year. 

The exhibition brings together dozens of Ruysch’s paintings borrowed from public and private European and American collections, along with her only known extant work on paper, as well as manuscripts, works by several women botanical artists of her era—including her sister—and contemporaneous examples of botanical and insect specimens.  

The exhibition positions Ruysch as an artist who both defied and defined her times, and makes the case that she should be a household name. Painting over six decades, she lived a remarkable life. She was the first woman admitted to the artistic society Confrerie Pictura in The Hague. Later, she was named court painter to Johann Wilhelm II, the Elector Palatine in Düsseldorf, a power figure in the Holy Roman Empire.  She married an artist too, Juriaen Pool, who was of a lesser fame. Add to this the seemingly impossible reality that she was the mother of 11 children, for whom she cared, and the monumentality of Ruysch’s persona begins to come into focus. 

Still, today her works remain absent from many major museum collections, including the Louvre, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and many others. “Nature Into Art” seems set on returning Ruysch to an appropriately vaunted stature. 

Still Lifes, Science, and Sex  

Holland, in the 17th century, witnessed a tremendous vogue for collecting and documenting exotic flowers and plants. While the 1630s had seen the rise of tulipmania, a fever for unusual varieties of tulips, at Hortus Botanicus, Amsterdam’s botanical garden, exotic plants had become the fascination, a seemingly innocuous pursuit that implicitly tied to the nation’s colonial exploits and enterprises, as hitherto unknown flora and fauna captured the European imagination.  

Rachel Ruysch’s still lifes were born of this moment and the science and politics that surrounded it; her famed and multifaceted botanist and anatomist father was an innovator in his field.

It was her father who recognized her nascent artistic talent, and who apprenticed her to Willem van Aelst, a well-known floral painter in Amsterdam, an unconventional decision for a woman of her times. Most women who were painters were relatives of male artists and apprenticed to them. 

“It’s this perfect moment where you can really connect depictions of nature with the sort of the broader context of inquiries into nature and the Scientific Revolution,” said Schindler.  The exhibition, which includes specimens of bugs and flowers new to Holland at the time, is a cross-disciplinary venture, with curators consulting scientific historians, zoologists, and botanists for the exhibition.  

One of the highlights of the exhibition is Ruysch’s only extant drawing—which isn’t of flowers, but of a Surinamese toad—which Schindler found at the Royal Society of London.  The drawing is a direct and intriguing link between Ruysch’s artwork and the scientific discourse at the time. It speaks to the lingering belief that certain creatures, namely insects and frogs, could reproduce spontaneously from a process known as a generation.  

“The idea was that certain life forms, especially those considered to be lower in the hierarchy, so butterflies, reptiles, amphibians, and all kinds of insects could emerge spontaneously out of a combination of warmth and moisture an inanimate matter, as you might find decomposing in the undergrowth of a forest floor,” explained Schindler, “This [drawing] is the only time that Ruysch doesn’t use plants as her essential motif. Instead, it’s essentially a portrait of a toad, and situates her in the science of the time.”  

While this example stands alone, the artist continued to invigorate what would be otherwise staid bouquets through the unexpected additions of insects and lizards to her arrangements. In some ways, these additions hinted at the vanitas paintings the Dutch were known for, the insects becoming memento mori hinting at decay, death, and brevity of life. At once, her inclusion of these “lower” life forms is evidence of her own innovative approach to the limited subject matter available to women of her generation.   

Anna Ruysch and Other Women Artists  

Interestingly, the genesis of this exhibition started not with Rachel Ruysch but with her sister, Anna. Also trained as a painter, Anna had her own career as a painter of botanical imagery though her works never reached the dexterity or popularity of her sister’s. 

Seven years ago, Schindler, then a curator at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama, came across a work by Anna Ruysch which he ultimately helped the museum acquire. While Schindler was passingly familiar with Rachel’s work, he was wholly unaware of Anna.  

“At first, I wanted to look at the two sisters together. Rachel goes on to have this outstanding career and Anna really doesn’t. How could that be, you know? Two sisters, both talented, two years apart, and learn from the same teacher, grow, up in the same learned environment, and one goes on to have this fabulous career and the other one doesn’t?” he mused.  

But as his research continued, Schindler realized a much larger exhibition of Rachel Ruysch’s work was in order. “Learning that Rachel had never had a monographic show until now, and the last publication about her work dates to 1956 made it apparent that something on a larger scale was really needed,” he added. 

Still, kernels of that original notion remain, with several works by Anna included in the show. The exhibition additionally situates Ruysch in a larger context of women artists of her era, showcasing works by Maria Sibylla Merian, Johanna Helena Herolt, and Alida Withoos, who were important botanical artists of the era.  

“We wanted to at least point to the fact in the context of this otherwise pretty monographic show that women artists played important, wide-spread roles, and Rachel was one of them,” said Schindler.  

In many ways, women’s influential role in botanical and still life painting points to the confines set against them. In the 17th century, a strict hierarchy of genres was observed. “History painting, which includes biblical, historical, and mythological scenes, was at the top.  Then portraiture, and, at the bottom, still life painting,” explained Schindler. Admission to the guild was often dependent upon these hierarchies. To become a history painter, the study of the human figure, ideally the human nude, was necessary—a course of study forbidden to women. 

“Because of the restrictions that were in place, women were already relegated to the lower genres,” said Schindler “Which in part explains, why there were so many women artists who specialized in botanical illustration.” 

A Life of Fame and Fortune

One of the most fascinating paintings in the exhibition is a 1692 portrait of Rachel Ruysch recently acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The portrait, which shows Ruysch at work surrounded by books and flora, is now believed to be a dual-artist work by portrait painter Michiel van Musscher and Ruysch herself. While van Musscher painted Ruysch’s likeness, it is believed Ruysch painted the lavish blossoms that appear set before her.   

The only recently discovered portrait hints at Ruysch’s impressive stature in her late 20s. It was a fame that would continue to grow through the 1700s.  “We know of one Leiden cloth merchant who paid dearly for a pair of paintings. Depending on which source you trust it was either 1,500 or 1,300 guilders for the pair, which was a very, very substantial amount at the time,” said Schindler. Her paintings entered preeminent collections in Germany, England, and Florence, including that of the Medicis. Research into her patrons and market is only in the early stages of scholarly inquiry, but she was without a doubt one of the leading artists of her age. “Hugely successful, Rachel Ruysch’s paintings often sold for more in her lifetime than Rembrandt’s did in his,” the National Gallery of London, notes on their website.  

In 1723, Ruysch, already a financial success, had the unbelievable luck of purchasing a winning lottery ticket.  For a decade that followed, she seems to have stopped painting, by and large. But in the final decade of her life, she returned to her still lifes, though on a smaller scale and a bit more brooding in temperament. She also began adding her age to the painting, as though to announce that she was still present, still painting at the height of her talents. Included in the exhibition is one such work, the 1741 painting Posy of Flowers, with a Beetle, on a Stone Ledge. Her last known work was painted at the age of 83.  

When Ruysch did pass away at the age of 86 in 1750, her death was met with a remarkable outpouring. She is believed to have painted some 250 works in her lifetime. “The year of her death, possibly still within her lifetime, a collection of poems is published, twelve of which celebrate her in the absolutely highest terms. It’s the most unusual honor for any art artist, in particular, a female artist, and just speaks to the level of esteem she was held in during her lifetime and in the mid-18th century,” said Schindler. 

For Schindler, he hopes that “Nature Into Art” is a mere jumping-off point for larger scholarly investigations of her work and life. “It’s been such a great project to work on I’m hoping we’ve found ways to get that across to visitors and open the door for more scholarship,” he said “There’s so much more to discover.” 

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com