From November 26, 2024 until March 16, 2025 Alte Pinakothek in Munich presents one of the greatest painters ever: Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750). The exhibition Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art is organized by Alte Pinakothek in Munich, Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio and Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Subsequently, from April 13 until July 7, 2024 the exhibition will be on show in Toledo, from August 23 until December 7, 2025 in Boston.
Although Rachel Ruysch was one of the highest paid painters of her time, the first woman admitted to The Hague painters’ society, appointed court painter in Dusseldorf to Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine, this is the first major exhibition dedicated to her outstanding work.
Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art. By Anna C. Knaap (Editor), Bernd Ebert (Editor), Robert Schindler (Editor), MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, December 2024, English, Hardcover, 224 richly illustrated pages. Accept cookies — we receive a commission; price unchanged — and order the exhibition catalogue from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de.
Exhibition view Rachel Ruysch – Nature into Art. Photograph copyright: Haydar Koyupinar, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München.
In their Preface, the curators, Bernd Ebert (Alte Pinakothek Munich), Robert Schindler (Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio), Anna C. Knaap (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), explain that the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue are monographic at their core, but take an interdisciplinary approach: art historians, historians of science, biologists, literary historians and others contributed to the show and catalogue. The result is an examination of Rachel Ruysch’s intellectual milieu, including the role played by her father, leading botanist and anatomist Frederik Ruysch, as well as the connections between her work and pressing scientific questions of the late 17th and 18th centuries. In addition, the exhibition highlights how the arrival of non-native specimens in the Netherlands was a catalyst for an increased interest in horticulture, creating the rich context in which the artist put her own personal signature on the still-life genre.
The show brings together a substantial group of her finest works, selected from at least 150 surviving paintings, some of which have not been seen in public for many years, or indeed, ever. The majority of Rachel Ruysch’s works are signed and dated—she painted from the age of 16 or 17 until she was 83.
In addition, the exhibition presents the largest group of paintings by her sister Anna Ruysch, two years younger, whose output remains little understood. Research about her is still in its infancy and is ham pered by the inaccessibility of many of her paintings. According to Robert Schindler’s catalogue contribution, like her sister, Anna Ruysch likely trained with the flower still-life painter Willem van Aelst either directly or through Rachel, and worked closely with her sister, copying her work and perhaps even collaborating with her. So far, only about a dozen and a half paintings have been attributed to her with varying degrees of success. Only five are signed, and only two appear to be dated—both 1685. She was almost 90 when she died in January 1754. of 1754. No portraits of her appear to survive. She was never even mentioned by Rachel Ruysch’s 1750 biographer Jan Van Gool.
Exhibition view Rachel Ruysch – Nature into Art. Photograph copyright: Haydar Koyupinar, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München.
In his catalogue essay, Robert Schindler explains that Rachel Ruysch’s maternal grandfather was the architect Pieter Post, who designed, among other buildings, the Huis ten Bosch for Amalia van Solms, the widow of widow of Stadholder Frederik Henrik; together with Jacob van Campen, the Mauritshuis in The Hague for Johan Maurits, the Princ of Nassau-Siegen and Governor of the colony Dutch Brazil; and the town hall in Maastricht.
Rachel Ruysch’s great uncle, Pieter’s brother, was Frans Post, a notable landscape painter who accompanied Johan Maurits to Brazil.
In 1661, the mother of Rachel Ruysch married Frederik Ruysch, a renowned scholar, doctor, teacher collector and artist, who later became a member of the Academia Leopoldina-Carolina then in Nuremberg, the Royal Society in London, and the French Académie Royale des Sciences.
Rachel Ruysch grew up in a period of tremendous advances in knowledge and understanding of the natural world, human anatomy, reproductive processes, botany and zoology. Her works are at the intersection of art, nature and science.
One of the reasons is that her father, Frederik Ruysch, was a surgeon, superintendent of midwifery for the city of Amsterdam, director of the city’s Botanical Garden (appointed in 1685), and himself a draughtsman and painter. He had assembled a famous collection of anatomical, zoological and botanical specimens, including human body parts. An apothecary by training, he made his name with a revolutionary embalming technique, which he used not merely to preserve dead bodies, but to imbue them with a fascinatingly lifelike appearance; some of his anatomical specimens have survived until today.
The sprawling collection was published in a catalogue running to several volumes – the so-called Thesauri. Attracting fellow scientists, aristocrats and tourists alike, the Museum Ruyschianum was even visited by the Russian Tsar, Peter the Great, who was so impressed that he purchased the entire collection in 1717 for the considerable sum of 30,000 guilders.
Exhibition view Rachel Ruysch – Nature into Art. Photograph copyright: Haydar Koyupinar, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München.
One of the longest biographies (24 pages) in Jan van Gool’s collection of 190 lives of famous Dutch artists entitled De Nieuwe schouburg is dedicated to Rachel Ruysch. According to Jan van Gool, who visited Rachel Ruysch in 1749 to interview her for his biography, published in 1750, the year of her death, her father had decided to apprentice Rachel to the famous flower still-life painter Willem van Aelst. According to Robert Schindler, the exact date that she joined van Aelst’s workshop is not known, but it was likely sometime in the late 1670s, and she worked in his studio until his death in 1683.
Rachel Ruysch’s earliest known work (1681), now in a private collection, depicts a festoon of flowers and fruits that hangs in a small niche (catalogue page 12, fig. 1). Irises, hollyhocks, African marigolds, green grapes, chestnuts and blackberries hang from a string attached to a nail at the top of the niche. Three butterflies or moths fly nearby or rest on leaves. Robert Schindler notes that a bouquet now in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen Münczhen, done probably in 1682, is the clearest evidence of her apprenticeship with van Aelst (page 14, fig. 2). It reflects the elder artist’s approach to designing a flower bouquet and also copies verbatim individual motifs known from his paintings, such as the double red-and-white tulip.
In addition to Willem van Aelst, the young Rachel Ruysch was inspired by works of the painters Abraham Mignon, Jan Davidsz. de Heem and his son Cornelis as well as Otto Marseus van Schrieck. Already by the mid-1680s, Rachel Ruysch had made a name for herself.
In her early career, she painted several forest-floor still lifes with amphibians, reptiles and insects in shadowy undergrowth or on tree stumps and wild plants, while moss and dark pools create a swamp-like atmosphere. Initially, they where inspired by Otto Marseus van Schrieck, who had invented the genre. From 1685 onwards, however, as she gradually freed herself from her role model, her interest turned to the zoological and botanical prepared specimens of her father.
In 1685, her father, Frederik Ruysch, became the director of the Botanical Garden in Amsterdam. Due to the global trading networks of the Dutch East India and Dutch West India Companies, plants from around the world, notably from Dutch colonies such as Mauritius, Batavia, Ceylon, Bengal and Suriname, found their way unto the Amsterdam Botanical Garden, where Rachel Ruysch most likely could study these often previously unknown plants and their different stages of development.
On August 12, 1693 Rachel Ruysch married the portrait painter Juriaen Pool. It appears to have been a union of love: Pool was the son of an impoverished goldsmith who had been raised in Amsterdam’s Burgerweeshuis (an orphanage for the burgher class). He does not seem to have brought either assets or social prestige to the marriage. Rachel Ruysch continued her successful career even after bearing no fewer than ten children. During the 1690s, she turned away from the forest-floor still life, devoting herself henceforth to flower and fruit pieces.
On June 4, 1701 both Rachel Ruysch and her husband were elected members of the painters’ guild, Confrerie Pictura, in The Hague. Ruysch was the first woman to receive this recognition.
Exhibition view Rachel Ruysch – Nature into Art. Photograph copyright: Haydar Koyupinar, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München.
According to Robert Schindler, from 1701 on, Rachel Ruysch started to paint about one or two large bouquets per year. Her compositions developed towards a more clearly defined oval-shaped bouquet with an emphasis on flowers over foliage, with fruit and individual insects placed near the vases.
In 1708, Rachel Rusch was appointed, along with her husband, as court painter to Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine in Düsseldorf. Johann Wilhelm was one of the prince- electors of the Holy Roman Empire and thus one of the highest-ranking German dukes. Together with his second wife, Anna Maria Louisa de Medici, he assembled a fabulous collection of paintings.
As a token of esteem, the Elector – together with his wife Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici – became the godparents of the youngest son of the Ruysch-Pool family, personally attending his baptism in Amsterdam.
In 1708, Rachel Ruysch painted only one bouquet, a painting now in Munich which belonged to Johann Wilhelm; the following year, she painted its pendant for the Elector (catalogue figs. 109 & 110). She would spend eight years in Johann Wilhelm’s service, from 1708 until the duke’s death in 1716. During this time, she painted a number of works for the duke, including a large canvas of fruits and flowers with an unusual horizontal format in 1714—the largest painting she ever painted (see fig. 111). According to Robert Schindler, the painting is an outlier in her oeuvre.
The last years in Johann Wilhelm’s service were unusually productive for Rachel Ruysch, as she signed and dated no less than seven paintings between 1715 and 1716, including a bouquet now at the Rijksmuseum (fig. 29). In 1716, Juriaen Pool painted a portrait of himself and his wife with their youngest son that marked the end of their tenure with Johann Wilhelm (fig. 115).
Exhibition view Rachel Ruysch – Nature into Art. Photograph copyright: Haydar Koyupinar, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München.
Robert Schindler mentions that no dated Rachel Ruysch paintings survive from the period between 1723 and 1738, although there is documentary evidence to suggest that she continued painting during this period.
Rachel Ruysch’s late period, from 1735 onwards, was marked by a bold change of style when she was already over 70 years of age. The dense, luxuriant bouquets now gave way to smaller, looser and more delicate floral arrangements, acknowledging the advent of French Rococo and the influence of the still lifes of Jan van Huysum, who set the standard for flower painting in the 1720s and 1730s.
When she was about seventy-five years old, Rachel Ruysch began to produce about one painting per year for the next decade. After her death, her paintings continued to garner significant prices when sold at auction throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They featured prominently in private collections and museums. She became a role model for female Dutch artists of the 19th century. She was never forgotten, but recognition of her work declined., she was (largely) excluded from art historical narratives, scholarship, and museum displays. According to Robert Schindkler, today, her recognition still falls short of the fame she had achieved during her lifetime (read also my 2009 German article about Rachel Ruysch).
The catalogue Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art features ten scholarly articles, including one by Marianne Berardi entitled The Artful Nature of Rachel Ruysch: What Distinguishes Her Painted World, and one by Charles C. Davis entitled Painting the Botanical World. And there is much more to discover in this lavishly illustrated book.
The still life painter Rachel Ruysch was second to none, and remains unsurpassed until today. She is one of my favorite artists, less so for her flower still lifes than for her other still lifes such as Fruit and Birds under a Tree in Front of the Entrance to a Cave, 1707, private collection (catalogue page 39, fig. 28), Still Life with Fruit, Bird’s Nest, and Insects, 1716, Dudmaston, Shropshireor (page 41, fig. 30), or Still Life with Fruits and Insects, 1710, private collection (page 65, fig. 48), to name just a few.
Last, but not least, Rachel Ruysch was not only lucky thanks to her upbringing, her talent and work, but she also won in the lottery. On August 26, 1723 Rachel Ruysch, Juriaen Pool and their son George won a major prize in the lottery of the States of Holland. The ticket had cost 10 guilders; the pre-tax value of the prize was 75,000 guilders – equivalent to the buying price for several Amsterdam houses.
In the exhibition, you learn that lotteries had been a widespread phenomenon in Europe since the 17th century. They helped to bolster state coffers and support charitable causes, such as building almshouses or providing aid for disaster victims. In the Netherlands the draws were popular public spectacles, with prizes including not only money but also works of art. The Ruysch-Pool family were regular lottery players: Rachel Ruysch had already won 200 guilders in 1713. The large win in 1723 may explain why she produced few works in the following years. If not before, she was now certainly financially independent.
Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art. By Anna C. Knaap (Editor), Bernd Ebert (Editor), Robert Schindler (Editor), MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, December 2024, English, Hardcover, 224 richly illustrated pages, with essays by ten specialists. Accept cookies — we receive a commission; price unchanged — and order the exhibition catalogue from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de.
For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations in this book review have not been put between quotation marks.
Exhibition and catalogue review added on January 3, 2024 at 16:56 Swiss time.
