'Rachel Ruysch: Nature Into Art' Review: An Overlooked Painter's Overflowing Flora
The Toledo Museum of Art devotes an exhibition to the 17th- and 18th-century Dutch artist, who enjoyed a decades-long career as the creator of vivid, virtuosic still lifes.

Toledo, Ohio

Renowned in her time, with her paintings in high demand, Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750) has nonetheless been largely ignored by museums. She has never had a major monographic exhibition, not even in her hometown of Amsterdam. Undeniably, it could be a challenge: Ruysch almost exclusively painted still lifes—the main genre open to female artists at the time—and almost always floral arrangements. Roomfuls of Ruysches, no matter how exquisite, might feel like a florist's shop.

"Flowers in a Glass Vase"

Robert Schindler, curator at the Toledo Museum of Art, solves the quandary by stressing her life story as the narrative thread. The result, "Rachel Ruysch: Nature Into Art," with 48 paintings by Ruysch, nearly a dozen by other artists, plus illustrated books, drawings, and botanical and zoological specimens, is on view through July 27; it had its debut last year at the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, in a slightly different form and, again with some changes, will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, after Toledo.

Here, a virtuoso painting, "Flowers in a Glass Vase" (1704), opens the exhibition. With

Detail

its perfect blooms, in many colors; its use of dramatic lighting to highlight a diagonal of white lily and pink roses; and staged appearances of a beetle and a butterfly at the base, it shows Ruysch at her best, made during the peak years of her artistic journey.

Ruysch's career had started nearly a quarter-century earlier. Born to Frederik Ruysch, an esteemed botanist and anatomist, and Maria Post, daughter of a famed architect, Rachel was sent in her teens to study with celebrated flower painter Willem van Aelst. Her earliest dated work, "Swag of Flowers and Fruit Suspended in Front of a Niche" (1681), with its glistening grapes and fluttering butterflies, demonstrates her talent at age 17. "Flower Piece" (c. 1682) illustrates a practice she learned from Van Aelst: to give each flower its own space.

Soon Ruysch was experimenting with her compositions, influenced by artists including Otto Marseus van Schrieck, whose "forest floor" paintings she copied, in her own way, and especially Jan Davidsz de Heem, whose "Forest Floor Still Life With Flowers and Amphibians" (c. 1660) inspired several works by Ruysch, again with variations.

This painting depicts 36 species.

At times, Ruysch also painted with her younger sister, Anna. They exchanged ideas, as several examples here show. But the less talented Anna stopped painting around 1688 after she married, while Rachel kept going. Except for a 12-year gap starting when she was 59, when she and her husband, the artist Juriaen Pool, won a lottery, Rachel put brush to canvas until she was 83—despite having 10 children.

Ruysch's father was critical to her career. They lived in an age of intense interest in natural history, including a craze to collect plant and animal specimens from all over the world. As a youngster, Rachel spent time in Frederik's laboratories, helping him catalog his species. In a gallery full of botanical and zoological illustrations, books (including some her father published) and preserved specimens, visitors enter Rachel's artistic milieu. She probably made many drawings, though only one survives, "Surinam Toad" (c. 1688)—a female hatching baby toads.

Lizard on attack detail

This gallery provides a key to Ruysch's popularity. Like all period floral painters, she concocted her confections, mixing up improbable combinations of blooms and bugs from different regions, seasons and climates. Her early and close observations of the natural world enabled her to paint works replete with accurately detailed flowers, insects, birds and amphibians. "Flowers in a Glass Vase" includes some 20 species of flowers and more than 15 insect species. Her spectacularly beautiful "Still Life of Exotic Flowers on a Marble Ledge" (c. 1735)—her last major painting—depicts 36 species.

Even more important, Ruysch imbued her paintings with dramatic little slices of life, giving them an uncommon dynamism. Her flowers shine, but they also wither and decay. More than once, she portrayed an energetic lizard closing in on a butterfly for a meal—as in "Still Life With Fruit and Flowers" (1714) and "Still Life With Fruit" (1711). Both "Still Life With Fruit, Bird's Nest, and Insects" (1716) and "Still Life With Fruit, Flowers, Reptiles and Insects on the Edge of a Forest" (1716) depict a striped lizard enjoying the contents of a bird's egg. Ruysch also placed bees, beetles, snails, caterpillars and more in her works.

Given to Cosimo, now at Uffizi

In 1701, Ruysch won election to the Hague's painters' guild—the first woman to be admitted (Amsterdam's guild prohibited women members). Then, in 1708, Johann Wilhelm II, Elector Palatine, and his wife, Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici, appointed her as court painter. She created at least four paintings for them, and Anna Maria Luisa gave two luxuriant works to her father, Grand Duke Cosimo III, that are now in the collection of the Uffizi—both here.

Ruysch continued to paint lush works, the best of her career; more than half of her paintings on display are dated after 1700. As she aged, her paintings became smaller; her last one, the delicate "Posy of Flowers, With a Tulip and a Melon on a Stone Ledge" (1748), hung near the exhibition's end, is just over 6 by 6 inches. It lacks her trademark vitality, but it bestows on viewers the poignancy of a red flower drooping over the edge.