Scientist of the Day - Rachel Ruysch

Detail of Still Life of Flowers (our third image), by Rachel Ruysch, 1695, private collection, Web Galley of Art (wga.hu)

Rachel Ruysch, a Dutch painter, was born June 3, 1664, in The Hague.  Her father was Frederik Ruysch, who was anatomy demonstrator at the Surgeon's Guild in Amsterdam, and who was noted for creating macabre tableaux from wax-injected anatomical parts, two of which you can see in our post on Ruysch.  So Rachel was exposed to anatomy and the art of arranging from an early age, acquiring skills and sensitivities that she would incorporate into her still-life painting. Her mother was the daughter of Pieter Post, the architect who helped design the Mauritshaus for Prince Maurits of Nassau, and whose brother Frans Post, a landscape painter, accompanied Maurits to Brazil in 1637 (see our post on Maurits, where you may see a painting by Frans Post).  So there was a lot of artistic talent in the gene pool that Rachel drew upon.

Portrait of Rachel Ruysch, oil on canvas, by Ruysch and Michiel van Musscher, 1692, Metropolitan Museum of Art, part of current exhibition, Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art (2024-2025) (toledomuseum.org)

Rachel became one of the finest still-life painters, male or female, of late 17th- and early 18th-century Dutch art, and she achieved that recognition in her own lifetime, which was unusual. She married a fellow painter, Juriaen Pool, with whom she had 11 children, and she managed to paint regularly through all of this child-raising, turning out hundreds of paintings during her productive lifetime, many of which survive in museum collections around the world. It helped that she lived to be 85, passing away on Oct. 12, 1750, in Amsterdam.

Still Life of Flowers, oil on canvas, by Rachel Ruysch, 1695, private collection, Web Gallery of Art (wga.hu)

I know something about 17th-century Netherlandish art, but little about still-life painting, but it is easy to see that the Dutch were quite fond of if, and that the key to a successful still life is a sense of arrangement and considerable technical skill, both of which Rachel Ruysch seems to have possessed in abundance.  Often floral still lifes have little to do with science, even though the subject matter is botanical, but Ruysch was fond of including beetles and insects in her paintings (first image), evoking Albrecht Dürer, and she also, at least in her earlier days, liked to arrange her flowers on a dead tree on the forest floor, rather than in a vase in a parlor, and such paintings have an ecological feeling that was unusual for the period (fourth image).

Flowers on a Tree Trunk, oil on canvas, by Rachel Ruysch, undated, Staatliche Museen, Kassel (wga.hu)

Rachel Ruysch has always been acknowledged as a master of Dutch still-life painting, but only recently has she been begun to be truly celebrated. In 2024, after years of organization, an exhibition devoted to Ruysch and Ruysch alone opened at the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, accompanied by a lavish printed catalogue. Both exhibition and catalogue were titled: Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art. The nice thing about the exhibition for American admirers is that it has now moved to the Toledo Museum of Art (as of April 2025), where you can view it until July 27, 2025, and then it is shifting to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, where it will be on display from Aug. 26 to December 2025. I hope to see it at one of those two venues before the paintings are returned to lenders. But one of those lenders was the Met in New York, which owns Ruysch’s collaborative self-portrait (second image), and another is the Detroit Museum of Art, which owns Ruysch's splendid Flowers in a Glass Vase (sixth image). Both paintings will be back on display in their respective homes after the exhibition has concluded.

Roses, Convolvulus, Poppies and Other Flowers in an Urn on a Stone Ledge, oil on canvas, by Rachel Ruysch, late 1680s, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. (nmwa.org)

Flowers in a Glass Vase, oil on canvas, by Rachel Ruysch, 1704, Detroit Institute of Arts, part of current exhibition, Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art (2024-2025) (toledomuseum.org)

And I might add that there is a Rachel Ruysch still life here in Kansas City, at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (seventh image).  I do not believe, however, that it is currently on display.

Still Life of Exotic Flowers on a Marble Ledge, by Rachel Ruysch, 1735, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City (art.nelson-atkins.org)

William B. Ashworth, Jr., Consultant for the History of Science, Linda Hall Library and Associate Professor emeritus, Department of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Comments or corrections are welcome; please direct to ashworthw@umkc.edu.