The Woman Who Perfected Flower Painting

If still-life painting is the art of arresting decay, then it makes a lot of sense that Rachel Ruysch grew up to become one of the greatest still-life painters in the history of art. In the 17th century, Frederik Ruysch, her father, was an internationally famous embalmer. His job was to make a natural object seem permanently alive and pleasing to the eye. He could transform the corpse of a bullet-pierced admiral into the “fresh carcase of an infant,” Samuel Johnson once said. He could turn dead children into the serenest version of themselves—their faces so full of life that people wanted to kiss them, as Peter the Great once did.The house where Rachel grew up, near the town hall in Amsterdam, had an annex for her father’s skeletons, organ jars, and severed limbs, which he collected along with a growing stockpile of dead insects, amphibians, and flowers. It was a rich soil in which to live and work if you were an ambitious Enlightenment-era man of science, as Frederik was. To be a child in that environment, though, would have been incredibly weird. Imagine your father coming home day after day smelling of organ meat, his clothes speckled with blood and vague fluids. He keeps trying to show you his newest cow’s heart or amputated foot, or a skink shipped in from one of the colonies. What’s that under the chair? Ah, yes—a piece of lung. The barrier between life and death starts to seem thinner, more porous. Your sense of beauty dilates and shifts.Rachel Ruysch (1664 –1750) did not spend her time dissecting stray dogs or making fake fiddles out of human thigh bones, as her father did. Instead she devoted herself to the most conventionally beautiful object in nature: the flower. In fact, she became one of the top flower painters in Europe. Even though Ruysch is now a footnote in art history, she was more famous in her own lifetime than Rembrandt and Vermeer.The first major show devoted to Ruysch, which arrived at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston in August (after opening in the United States at the Toledo Museum of Art, in Ohio, in the spring), is one of the most intelligently curated and sensory-rich shows a museumgoer could ask for. It includes boxes perfumed with the scents of Ruysch’s flowers, jars of pickled toads and lizards that feature in her paintings, cases of beetles and botanical illustrations, new translations of Dutch primary sources, and a sorely needed crop of research on her work.The only sticking point, really, is Ruysch’s paintings. They are easy to like but harder to love—at least for viewers marooned in the 21st century. Over the course of her nearly 70-year career, Ruysch shunned radical innovation and experimentation, and opted for the subtlest of variations on a theme. No grand gestures or avant-garde maneuvers. Just refinement, focus, and perfection. Flowers and fruit.In the gilded arena of Dutch stilleven, or “still life,” there are banquet pieces, with wine-filled goblets and oysters and corkscrews of lemon peel, and breakfast spreads, with everyday nibbles, such as cheese and nuts. Pronk, or “show,” paintings display piles of gold vessels and jewels and silk. Vanitas pieces depict items such as skulls and pocket watches, reminding you that you’re going to die soon. What might be considered the lowest subgenre today is bloemstilleven, or “flower still life.” A seemingly decorative object (a flower) is represented in another decorative object (a painting), which rates as an even lesser decorative object—a flower painting.To anyone who has spent more than a few minutes with a flower piece by Ruysch or her predecessors Ambrosius Bosschaert or Jan Davidsz de Heem, this ranking will seem mostly pea-brained. Start with the fact that flower paintings are the most visually sumptuous portraits of nature’s most freakish and colorful sex organs. You are staring at a highly evolved specimen whose entire appearance is predicated on seducing living creatures—yourself included—to propagate its existence.Unlike some pollinators, we’re not in the business of sticking our proboscis into flowers, but we do eat them, collect them, place them on coffins, give them to prom dates, throw them at weddings, decorate our homes with their odor and shape. Flowers have consoled people, driven them to obsession and despair, and sent them into the pit of legal turmoil and financial ruin. They’ve also made people extravagantly rich. Before the tulip speculation bubble burst in 1637, about 30 years prior to Ruysch’s birth, Semper Augustus bulbs were being sold for as much as 5,000 guilders—a single tulip cost more than 10 times the annual salary of a highly skilled artisan.The genius of a flower still life is that it converts a perishable commodity into a stable one. It can also yoke together blooms from different seasons and continents to create as many retinal fireworks per square inch as possible. The savviest artists pick “the downy peach, the finely dusted plum, the smooth apple, the burnished cherry, the dazzling rose, the manifold pink, the variegated tulip,” all in their maximum ripeness, as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, and apply an understanding of botany “from the root up.” More than imitating nature, the flower painter elevates it. One artist whose masterpieces dared to accomplish this “impossible” task, Goethe said, was Rachel Ruysch.
Still Life With Fruits and Insects (1710) (Johnny Van Haeften / Bridgeman Images)
When we first meet Ruysch in the exhibition, she’s already a teenage prodigy. Her first known work, Swag of Flowers and Fruit Suspended in Front of a Niche (1681), is a dangling bouquet loaded with irises, hollyhocks, marigolds, grapes, and wild berries. Around the age of 15, she was apprenticed by her father to the renowned flower painter Willem van Aelst (reportedly a difficult man). The twisting vines and mint-green leaves in the piece are very Van Aelstian, but the general setup, with flowers strung together and nailed upside down, is likely borrowed from de Heem. Even though Ruysch’s style and method will evolve in the coming years—new cultivars and pigments dropping in (Prussian blue), more bustling compositions and tighter brushwork—the main ingredients of her mature output are already here: the spare background and the glowing flowers and fruit, raked by natural light but seemingly lit from within. My favorite touch is the mini-bramble of pale-gold lines in the bottom right that yields the words Rachel Ruysch. It’s less a signature than a wink. We’re looking at the hand of a highly precocious teen who knows she’s very good and isn’t afraid to boast.By the time Ruysch was in her 20s, poems were already being written about her. She was hailed as a “floral goddess,” better than Maria van Oosterwijck (a celebrated flower painter in Amsterdam). In her 30s, Ruysch became the first woman admitted to the Confrerie Pictura, the painters’ guild in The Hague. In her 40s, she was handpicked to be a court painter for Johann Wilhelm, a prince-elector of the Holy Roman Empire and a high-ranking German duke. In her 50s, Ruysch won the lottery—literally won the lottery, to the tune of 75,000 guilders. (For comparison: The townhouse her father bought on the Bloemgracht—“flower canal”—in an upscale Amsterdam neighborhood cost 8,000 guilders.)This kind of good fortune is difficult to interpret. The “obstacle race” long faced by women artists, to borrow from the title of Germaine Greer’s pathbreaking 1979 work of feminist art history, often looks more like a gravy train with Ruysch: one stroke of predestined luck after another. She grew up in a wealthy and well-connected family. Her great-uncle was a painter, her cousins were painters, and the whole town was swimming in painters, artist-botanists, and horticulturalists.But her life was not frictionless. Barred from Latin schools, universities, and professional guilds in Amsterdam, Ruysch couldn’t have pursued any genre of painting that spoke to her. She was likely steered toward flower still lifes by her father, as a suitable subject for someone of her gender. She then had to fight her way into a fiercely competitive art market—in a city, country, and century more obsessed with flowers than any other—all while giving birth to 10 children, only six of whom survived into adulthood. After Ruysch won the lottery, she stopped painting almost entirely for 15 years.What set Ruysch apart throughout her career was a trademark style and subject: big, blossomy bouquets set against a dark, velvety background; high-wattage light that’s coming from somewhere over your left shoulder; tons of insects and crawling creatures; a simple stone or marble ledge to support the vase; and a dizzying variety of cultivars and blooms. While other flower painters were building bouquets from cut flowers widely available in Western Europe, Ruysch had a direct line, through her father, to exotic blooms in the Amsterdam botanical gardens. A single arrangement of Ruysch’s from a 1700 painting has more than 22 species in it: devil’s trumpets, passionflower, coral honeysuckle, an African pumpkin, a cheeky-looking pineapple (rare in Dutch still life). Another, from about 1735, has flowers from every single continent except Antarctica.You could get your hands on anything in a port city in an aquatic empire, whether it was Brazilian sugar or Indonesian pepper. From 1602, when the Dutch East India Company was chartered, to the 1660s, when Ruysch was born, the Dutch Republic boomed. Colonies and outposts sprouted up everywhere from New Amsterdam (now New York City) to Nagasaki. Dutch fluyts crisscrossed the globe, carrying all manner of cargo (Baltic grain, Caribbean salt), as well as hundreds of thousands of human beings bought and sold as chattel—the Dutch transported approximately 600,000 enslaved people across the Atlantic from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Wealth flowed into the coffers of merchants and regents back home, and turned consumption into a national pastime. A well-fed mercantile class with lots of money, and time to spend it, created the perfect conditions for a popular art market and a new stand-alone genre: “still life.”What is the best way to interpret a painting of motionless stuff  ? Theories abound. In Ruysch’s case, one can apply several different lenses, viewing each piece as an aesthetic object, a scientific illustration, and a moral message. Take a pair of paintings from 1710: Still Life of Flowers in a Glass Vase on a Marble Ledge is a monumental bouquet; Still Life With Fruits and Insects is a large spillage of fruit on a forest floor—both commissioned by a Leiden textile merchant for a whopping 1,300 guilders total. What we have are two pieces of eye candy. Every rose and grape is clamoring for your attention. Even the dark background is colluding with the waxy petals and fruit to pop toward you. It’s a mouthwatering visual buffet. (Arthur Schopenhauer once argued that Dutch still life was a low form of art because it made you want to eat the bouquet, Edible Arrangements–style, instead of contemplate it, grinding your aesthetic faculties to a halt with hunger. I can see what he means.)When the initial dazzlement wears off, your focus sharpens. What’s that—a katydid? A sand lizard? Even if your eye is glued to the painting, your brain is elsewhere. The flame tulip sends you to Turkey, the common sunflower to North America, the butterflies and insects to the entomologist’s corkboard. It’s an informational trove for the science-minded viewer (and indeed, the patron, Pieter de la Court van der Voort, was a crafty horticulturist with a flair for new hothouse techniques).Then, suddenly, something changes. At first, the insects seem to be having a little fiesta with the fruit—ants, wasps, and spiders nibbling at a peach or scurrying toward a chestnut. Now you notice that the sand lizard’s forked tongue is just milliseconds away from snatching a butterfly. Another lizard in the corner has just infiltrated a bird’s nest filled with fresh eggs and seems to be emitting a barbaric yawp. The painting starts to flex under the pressure of death. The spongy forest floor looks fungal; the pomegranate teems with its own seeds; the corn kernels become warts; the grapes are fish eggs. The entire composition is slithering and crawling with itself. It is, in a word, monstrous.As a viewer, you can xylophone your way up and down these notes—the aesthetic pleasure; the scientific stimulation; the cruelty of nature as moral warning—or play them in your head all at once. Sometimes it just depends on how close you’re standing to the painting.
Posy of Flowers, With a Tulip and a Melon, on a Stone Ledge (1748) (Bridgeman Images)
For decades, scholars have wrung their hands over how the Dutch saw their still lifes. Was a grape just a grape? Or was it a reminder of the Eucharist? Perhaps every pineapple was a portal to a colony keeping the empire afloat. Or maybe a still life was a stimulus for consumption, its decorative slickness training your eyes to move on to the next thing you wanted to buy or sell. By the late 1700s, the genre had been marinating in its own juices for too long—some of its tropes were now 150 years old. The golden age of Dutch art was over (whether its painters were aware or not), and many viewers must have felt bored by the grape rather than inspired or rebuked by it.Ruysch finished her last piece when she was 83 years old. Posy of Flowers, With a Tulip and a Melon, on a Stone Ledge (1748) is a small miracle of a painting. About the size of a floor tile, it has more feeling and tenderness than all of the trumpeting bouquets and whirlpools of color. A little striped tulip, its petals barely open, seems as if it’s trying to lift itself out of bed. A shy melon sits behind it, with wildflowers huddled around. The signature is lightly painted and barely there. Even the veins of the stone table are daubed on like afterthoughts, as if the world of hard surfaces and sharp edges has less meaning here, in the domain of flowers. Ruysch’s work can do that: turn a flower into the most important thing in the world, at the moment it’s being painted and seen. What more could a flower want?This article appears in the September 2025 print edition with the headline “The Forgotten Still-Life Prodigy.”