BOSTON — Dainty, fussy, and prim: These are the common connotations of a flower still life. Such paintings often suggest garden clubs and floral arrangements and life in the safe lane. One might think an entire exhibition of them could be a bit of a bore. This notion belies the sensuous density of flowers — their colors, their intricate petals, their scents — and their function, which is, after all, sex. Their life cycle matches our own as they bud, bloom, fade, and die. Honor the garden club ladies: they are face-to-face with the very matter of life.
The paintings of Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750), now on view in Artist, Naturalist, and Pioneer at the Museum of Fine Arts, tap into the power of flowers. Through scores of paintings across four rooms, almost all of bouquets, the viewer can luxuriate in floral abundance and variety, all sharpened by an acute awareness of death, decay, and the violence of nature. The artist rarely depicted flowers alone; these bouquets buzz with insects and spiders while hungry amphibians and combative lizards crawl beneath. To underscore the scientific accuracy of her portrayals, the installation includes numerous natural specimens floating in jars and pinned in boxes, courtesy of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Rachel Ruysch, “Still Life of Exotic Flowers on a Marble Ledge” (about 1735), oil on canvas; The Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri (courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
Rachel Ruysch was not the first woman painter of flowers, but she was by far the most successful. The daughter of an anatomist-botanist, she studied with the still life painter Willem van Aelst and was selling her works by the time she was 18. Unusually for a woman artist of this time period, she painted throughout her marriage to fellow artist Juriaen Pool and, most impressively, while rearing 10 children.
A typical trait of flower paintings from this time was a then-impossible display of blooms from different seasons, rubbing petals with one another as if time had no meaning. Ruysch does the same with her subjects’ geographic range, enmeshing herself in a network of scholars and artists who collected and recorded specimens from across the Dutch colonial empire. Her works combine blossoms from vastly different locations into single compositions; the most extreme example of this is “Still Life with Exotic Flowers on a Marble Ledge” (1735), which features 36 different species from Europe, North America, South America, Africa, Asia, Indonesia, and Australia. A single butterfly sits at the bottom of the bouquet in demure embarrassment at the profusion.
Rachel Ruysch, “Still Life with Fruits and Flowers (1714), oil on canvas; Kunstsammlungen und Museen Augsburg, Karl and Magdalene Haberstock Stiftung (© Kunstsammlungen und Museen Augsburg, photo Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Nicole Wilhelms. Image courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
Not only do Ruysch’s paintings represent her subjects, but some include literal impressions of them. Like another Dutch painter, Otto Marseus van Schrieck, she occasionally pressed the wings of butterfly specimens onto the surface of the wet paint (for example, in “Still Life with Fruit and Insects”), transferring their fine scales to her canvas. Less macabre was her technique of using actual moss: She’d daub a sample in paint and apply it to the canvas to recreate its softly spangled texture.
Similarly, Ruysch seemed to relish the convergence of oil paint’s effects — its intense pigments, sheen, and potential for translucency and opacity — with the properties of flower petals, especially as their appearance changes with the light. In the Mauritshuis Museum’s “Vase with Flowers” (1700), for instance, the pale outer petals of a peony contrast with its richly tinted interior. The viewer may well envy the bee that burrows into its sherbert-pink depths.
Ruysch encourages the sense that audiences can very nearly obtain this immersion themselves. As her career progressed, her overall compositions often moved toward disorienting abundance. Rejecting the airier, leafier style of Van Aelst’s work, she snuggles her flowers together as intricately as puzzle pieces. As such, the ideal viewing distance is about 18 inches. From this perspective, you can mull over the painting’s details and sup like an insect from each flower’s beauty, as in the Toledo Museum’s “Flower Still Life” (c. 1716–20).
Rachel Ruysch, “Still Life with Fruit and Insects” (1683), oil on canvas; Private Collection (photo Natasha Seaman/Hyperallergic)
Around 1708, Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine in Düsseldorf, made Ruysch his court painter. She served in this position of honor largely from a distance, regularly dispatching completed paintings. He gifted two of them to his father-in-law, Cosimo III de’ Medici, the grand duke of Tuscany, but kept the best one for himself: Ruysch’s largest painting, at about four feet wide. Its modern title, “Still Life with Fruit and Flowers,” is a laughable understatement. A stone ledge supporting a basket of flowers and a distant view of a misty copse provide minimal organization to the composition. But it also burgeons with peaches, pomegranates, plums, red and green grapes, hazelnuts, white mulberries, an ear of corn, blackberries, and three vaguely ominous melons, one whose skin has ruptured to reveal its pink flesh. As for flowers, there are many, as well as butterflies, moths, ants, bees, beetles, spiders, caterpillars, snails, lizards, a grasshopper, a dragonfly, and a bird sitting in a nest. Did the Elector Palatine have time for much else besides looking at it?
Ruysch continued painting into her 80s, the canvases smaller and less intricate than before but no less adoring of the precise structure of the flowers and insects she depicted. A diva of a pink rose dominates “Posy of Flowers” (1741), its petals strewn with drops of water. It sits on a stone ledge surrounded by a tangle of smaller flowers and attended by a bee. A longhorn beetle poses elegantly to the left, its striped antennae aloft. The stem of the rose, thickly furred with thorns, protrudes toward us, daring us to grasp it. A bud of the same flower bends backward, its sepals a calligraphic twirl of green and yellow. Mingled with these, Ruysch has used the same pigments to paint her name on the facing surface of the ledge. Honor the flower painter, for she has been face-to-face with the very matter of life.
Rachel Ruysch, “Still Life with Fruit” (1711), oil on panel (photo Natasha Seaman/Hyperallergic)
Rachel Ruysch, “Flower Still Life” (about 1716–20), oil on canvas; Toledo Museum of Art (courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
Rachel Ruysch, “Flower Still Life,” detail (photo Natasha Seaman/Hyperallergic)
Rachel Ruysch, “Flowers in a Basket” (about 1711), oil on canvas; Uffizi Gallery, Florence (photo Natasha Seaman/Hyperallergic)
Rachel Ruysch, “Vase with Flowers” (1700), oil on canvas; Mauritshuis Museum, The Hague (photo Natasha Seaman/Hyperallergic)
Rachel Ruysch, “Vase with Flowers,” detail (photo Natasha Seaman/Hyperallergic)
Rachel Ruysch: Artist, Naturalist, and Pioneer continues at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (465 Huntington Ave, Boston, Massachusetts) through December 7. The exhibition was curated by Anna Knaap of the MFA Boston, with guidance for the scientific content from Charles Davis, Harvard University.
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