Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art

Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art

The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH, 12^th April-27^th July 2025

 

After a triumphant showing at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, the groundbreaking exhibition Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art has moved on to the Toledo Museum of Art in an equally dazzling display created by Selldorf Architects, the TMA’s exhibition design partner, working with Toledo’s Dr Robert Schindler, William Hutton Curator of European Art.

 

Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750), the daughter of the famous Amsterdam professor of anatomy and botany, Frederik Ruysch, grew up in a ferment of scientific enquiry and discovery. She trained with the flower painter Willem van Aelst and more than matched her mentor and indeed many of the male painters of the day. With access to her father’s scientific specimens and Amsterdam’s outstanding botanical garden, Ruysch observed her flowers and insects with precision, but also with a joy in the tactile qualities of the natural world. She incorporated species from the Dutch East Indies, North and South America, brought to Europe in an age of exploration. They include the sinister beauty of the Datura or Devil’s Trumpet Flower, a showy bloom with hallucinogenic properties. Ruysch sometimes pressed real butterflies against wet oil paint to give a ghostly image of their iridescent patterns, blurring the border between reality and imitation.

 

Rachel Ruysch married the portrait painter Jurian Pool, with whom she had ten children. She was the first female member of Amsterdam’s Confrerie Pictura and in 1708 was appointed Court Painter to the Elector Palatine in Düsseldorf. She could command 1,000 guilders for a painting, but in 1723 won 75,000 guilders on the Dutch State lottery, the equivalent of millions today. Dedicated to her profession, she nevertheless continued to paint until the age of eighty-three, three years before her death in 1750. Even in her day she was celebrated by poets and biographers as the ‘Amsterdam Pallas’.

 

Two paintings formerly with Richard Green have been generously lent to the exhibition by their current owners. The magnificent Still life of roses, tulips, a sunflower and other flowers epitomizes the grandest stage of Dutch flower painting in the Golden Age. It was made in 1710, when Ruysch was at the height of her powers and celebrated across Europe as Court Painter to the Elector Palatine.

 

Different again in spirit, showing the tremendous range of Ruysch over her long career, is the Still life of a bouquet of pink and white roses and other flowers in a glass vase, with a bird’s nest, made in 1738, when Ruysch was seventy-four years old. The delicately-ruffled, rounded blooms and brighter, blonder palette show her responding to the currents of the Rococo emanating from France. The elegant S-curve of the composition sends a gentle, warm breeze through the bouquet. The extensive survey sets Ruysch’s work in context with paintings by her mentor Willem van Aelst and her contemporaries, including her sister Anna, who steps out of the shadows as a fine flower painter in her own right. There is something deeply, spiritually satisfying in the contemplation of Ruysch’s celebration of the floral world that speaks across the centuries to our own concerns about the preservation of our planet. 

 

After Toledo, the exhibition travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in the summer and autumn of 2025. An excellent example of US-European cooperation, the exhibitions have been co-curated by Dr Schindler, Dr Bernd Ebert of the Alte Pinakothek and Dr Antien Knaap of the Museum of Fine Arts.

 

The exhibition travels to the Toledo Museum of Art, 13^th April-27^th July 2025 and to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in the autumn of 2025.

 

Rachel Ruysch, Still life of roses, tulips, a sunflower and other flowers in a glass vase with a bee, butterfly and other insects upon a marble ledge.

Signed and dated lower right: Rachel Ruysch/1710.
Oil on canvas: 88.9 x 71.1 cm / 35 3/8 x 28 in.

Collection of Janice and Brian Capstick, on loan to the National Gallery, London.

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Rachel Ruysch, Still life of a bouquet of pink and white roses, poppy anemones, primroses, forget-me-nots, jonquils, daffodils, snowballs, honeysuckle and a tulip in a glass vase, with a bird’s nest.

Signed and dated upper left: Rachel Ruysch /1738.

Oil on canvas: 17 ¼ x 15 ¼ in / 44 x 39 cm.

Private collection, USA.

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