FRUIT, FLOWERS AND INSECTS; RACHEL RUYSCH

Floral Still Life

FRUIT, FLOWERS AND INSECTS:

RACHEL RUYSCH

By Joan K Yanni

Rachel Ruysch, the painter of Floral Still Life (82.9), was the best flower painter of her day and probably the greatest female painter before the second half of the 18^th century.  MAG’s painting, done in 1686, is one of the artist’s earliest known paintings.

Ruysch was born in Amsterdam in 1664 to highly distinguished parents.  Her mother, Maria Post, was the daughter of Pieter Post, a renowned architect, and her father, Anthony Frederick Ruysch, was a professor of anatomy and botany as well as an amateur painter. Her father collected scientific specimens--shells, fossils, insects, skeletons, minerals and rare plants. Rachel helped him with the dissections and mounting necessary for his collection and often painted backgrounds for his displays.

Rachel’s talent was discovered early, and when she was fifteen, she was apprenticed to Willem van Aelst, a versatile still life artist who specialized in fruit and flower paintings. This arrangement in itself was unusual. At this time it was not the custom for a woman, let alone a young girl, to be apprenticed to a male painter unless he was a relative. Luckily Rachel’s parents’ enlightened attitude helped get her the best possible training. As would be expected, her early work shows the influence of van Aelst.

Ruysch’s first dated works are from 1682, when she was only 18. One is a study of insects and a thistle plant in a landscape; the other is a painting of flowers, apples and quinces hanging together in a bunch.  She began to use contrasting scenes of dark woodlands and brilliant flowers in her works almost from the start. A work from 1685, Still Life with Flowers and Insects in a Landscape, uses a shady landscape setting as background for an impressive collection of flowers, vegetation, rocks and reptiles, all perfectly detailed.

This practice of combining dark and light shows her knowledge of and appreciation for the work of Otto Marseus van Schriek, a painter of the time whose specialty was a blend of dark settings contrasted with exotic flora and fauna.  Flower painting had fallen out of favor after the collapse of Holland’s tulip market in the 1630s; van Schriek’s nature paintings were a way of reintroducing pictures of flowers--but not tulips. Ruysch sometimes used elements of van Schriek’s paintings, rearranged and put into her own settings. Our Floral Still Life is one of about a dozen still lifes in nature painted early in her career. Technically, these are not flower paintings, but woodland still lifes.                                                                                    

Most of her early works differ drastically from the conventional flower painting of flowers in a vase in the center of a composition. She has avoided the vase and instead places plants in a dark, outdoor setting inhabited by insects, reptiles, and amphibians. The setting in Floral Still Life is entirely artificial, though details are realistically presented. The

                       

Spot lighted roses, lilies, iris, morning glories, opium poppies and mushrooms, for example, are painted with the same precision lavished on the trunk of the old tree from which they appear to grow. Although some of the plants pictured grow in or near water, the blooms are not indigenous to this environment. There are no tulips in the composition.

In 1693 Rachel married Juriaen Pool, a portrait painter.  The two had ten children, and it is remarkable that, despite her domestic responsibilities, she continued to paint. She and her husband entered the Hague Painters’ Guild together in 1701.  During her years in the Guild, Ruysch honed her skills and developed a style of her own, showing her technical virtuosity.  She highlighted vivid flowers in a natural setting, emphasizing the contrast between the grotesque and the beautiful in nature. When she used vases, they contained blossoms from every growing season as well as exotic flowers she must have seen only in Amsterdam’s botanical gardens where her father was supervisor.

Ruysch gained international recognition around 1708 when she and her husband were appointed court painters to the elector palatine, Johann Wilhelm, in Düsseldorf. The elector bought all of the paintings she produced during her eight years in his court, and sent two of them as a gift to his father-in-law, Cosimo III de’ Medici of Tuscany. These paintings are now in the Uffizi in Florence. After the elector died, Ruysch returned with her family to Amsterdam. She continued to paint until the age of eighty-three, two years before her death.

The flowers in MAG’s Floral Still Life are arranged in an

S-curve at the right of the canvas.  They seem to be growing out of a dead tree; a large rock anchors the tree trunk. Elements in the painting can be seen as vanitas references, reflecting the idea of memento mori, the transience of life: “Remember, man, that thou art dust and into dust thou shalt return.” The morning glories and opium poppies, standing next to each other, symbolize night and day; the lizards, toads, and half-eaten toadstools symbolize death. The butterflies in the composition reflect the resurrected soul.  However, the usual representations of death are absent: the skull, hour glass, candle, or goldfinch (which feeds on thistles and represents the crown of thorns in the Crucifixion) are lacking, suggesting that Ruysch was not interested primarily in vanitas. Rather, she chose blooms in an outdoor setting because she was familiar with nature and the creatures in it.  These she pictured with an accuracy that must have come from her work with her father.                  

Ruysch achieved an international reputation in her lifetime, but interest in her works did not decline after her death. Her works brought high prices when she was alive and they remain sought-after today.

Source: Susan Dodge-Peters, ed., Memorial Art Gallery, An Introduction to the Collection; Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin, Women Artists 1550-1950; Marianne Berardi, “The Nature Pieces of Rachel Ruysch,” Porticus, vol. X-XI 19 87-1988

NB: Paintings by van Aelst and van Schriek will be in the upcoming Natura Morta exhibit coming to MAG from April 1 to May 27.