Ruysch, Rachel (1664–1750)

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RUYSCH, RACHEL (1664–1750)

RUYSCH, RACHEL (1664–1750), Dutch painter. One of the most successful women artists of early modernity, Ruysch was born in The Hague. While growing up, she assisted her father, Frederik Ruysch, a professor of anatomy and botany, by recording the appearances of the exotic plants he studied. The resulting works may have encouraged her father, who was also an amateur painter and collector, to apprentice his fifteen-year-old daughter to the Amsterdam still life painter Willem van Aelst (1627–c. 1683). While it was uncommon for a girl to train for a profession outside the home, painting still lifes posed fewer obstacles than other genres because, for example, she was spared drawing from nude models—an activity deemed inappropriate for women until well into the twentieth century.

In her earliest works, Ruysch closely followed the dramatically lit woodland scenes of the Dutch painters of the previous generation, Otto Marseus van Schrieck and Abraham Mignon (1640–1679). In paintings like Arrangement of Flowers by a Tree Trunk from the 1680s (Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum), Ruysch depicted forestal vignettes complete with small-scale creatures. Characteristically, Ruysch repeats Schriek's motif of the lizard with a butterfly perched in its open mouth, but minimizes the menacing import of such a creature by reducing its scale and by relegating it to the fringe of the composition. Mignon's influence is more noticeable in Floral Still Life from 1686 (Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester), which replicates the right half of a Mignon painting in Vaduz Castle. Ruysch adopted Mignon's practice of placing cultivated plants in natural settings, but she omitted Mignon's signature goldfinches and other latent Christian symbols. By choosing to stress decorative effects over iconographic details in both the Glasgow and Rochester paintings, Ruysch limits symbolic interpretations of her paintings.

In 1693 Ruysch married Mignon's adopted son, the portrait painter Juriaen Pool. Despite the demands of raising ten children, Ruysch remained active as a painter, becoming a member of the Confrerie Pictura in 1701 and later joining the painter's guild in The Hague in 1709. Shortly thereafter, Ruysch and Pool relocated to Düsseldorf, where they became court painters to the elector palatine John William.

In her mature works Ruysch increased the decorative and theatrical aspects of her compositions, presumably to suit her patron's sense of refinement. While her early endeavors represented floral groupings as they occurred in nature, she later experimented with juxtapositions of cultivated and wild plants in vased bouquets. Ruysch also explored fruit assemblages as pendants to her floral pieces. One sees all of these elements combined in Fruit and Flowers in a Forest from 1714 in Augsburg. This piece, which originally hung in the elector's bedroom, shows Ruysch's skill in rendering the vibrant flowers' fragility to contrast with the lusciously firm fruits strung across the forest floor, a motif that recalls her earlier woodland vignettes. Ruysch deliberately composed the scene, imposing her own order upon the natural world with the floral arrangement occupying the upper register across the stone ledge, the fruit closer to the Earth, and the requisite insects and reptiles framing the scene from the periphery. In the Augsburg painting, as in her entire oeuvre, Ruysch retained the dark, moody lighting of her early manner, yet heightened the vibrancy of individual elements. For example, while at the elector's court, she began to employ the newly discovered pigment Prussian blue, an inexpensive means of summoning luminous blues. Similarly, Ruysch utilized a smooth touch to craft crystal-clear surfaces. When Ruysch and Pool returned to Amsterdam in 1716, Ruysch brought her aristocratically fostered aesthetic with her and continued to paint elegant still lifes such as Still Life with Flowers on a Marble Table Top, now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Here, Ruysch replicated the supple textures of the petals and crafted a subtle play of pinks against the dark backdrop and cobalt vase, as she had done in Düsseldorf, but restricted the scope to a moderately sized bouquet. Ruysch painted works of this type for gentrified Dutch burghers until she was well into her eighties.

Ruysch's work found a receptive audience and contemporary writers praised her extensively. Such esteem was admirable for any painter, but especially so for a woman. As Johan van Gool wrote in De nieuwe schouburg der Nederlandtsche kunstschilders en schilderessen in 1750, her artfulness "was all the more astonishing and to be praised in women, who by nature are destined to other occupations"(vol. 2, p. 541). Despite such gendered trepidations, Ruysch earned international renown for her expertly wrought and pleasingly arranged creations.

See also Netherlands, Art in the ; Women and Art .