Rachel Ruysch, Self-Portrait, 1692. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750)
Rachel Ruysch was one of the most successful Dutch still life painters of the 17th and 18th centuries. Ruysch was born in The Hague, but grew up in Amsterdam. She was the oldest daughter of Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731), a famous professor of anatomy and botany. She learned to paint from Willem van Aelst (1627-1683). At that time, he was the best still life painter in Amsterdam. During her own time, she her paintings were higher valued than those by Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (1606-1669). Her refined paintings with colourful, lifelike flowers were among the best of their kind at the time. Ruysch was a court painter for a German prince and the first woman to be a member of the artists’ society Pictura in The Hague. She was famous both at home and abroad.
Frederik Ruysch, Illustration from Opera Omnia Anatomico-Medico-Chirurgica, ca. 1737.
Ruysch grew up in a family where she had more opportunities than most other women at that time. Her father Frederik Ruysch had developed a new way of preserving body parts. This meant that the human body could be studied more closely than ever. Frederik had a large collection of curiosities, including stuffed animals, dried plants and preserved body parts. He also made fantasy landscapes using preserved human organs and babies’ skeletons. His collection was popular with tourists and many important guests came to see it. Rachel also drew and painted her father’s collection. Her drawings were so good that at the age of fifteen she was given permission to train as an artist.
Rachel Ruysch, Tree Trunk surrounded by Flowers, Butterflies and Animals, 1685. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.
Ruysch worked with great care and tried to paint everything as naturally as possible. Guided by her teacher Van Aelst, she started painting ‘forest floors’, or sottobosco—pictures of snakes, snails, toads and insects among plants and bushes. She painted insects, blades of grass and small flowers using a very fine brush. Ruysch also used real moss, dipped in paint, to give the texture of the forest floor.
Rachel Ruysch, Still Life with Flowers, 1709. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Ruysch’s paintings show flowers, plants and animals that would never be seen together in the real world. That is because she used living and preserved models. In her flower paintings she combined flowers that came out in different seasons. She found rare plants from faraway countries at the Hortus Botanicus botanical gardens, where her father taught botany. Her father’s collection also included rare plants. He had a way of preserving them that made them look like they were flowering forever.
Rachel Ruysch, Observations of a Surinam Toad, 17th century. Courtesy of the Royal Society.
Surinam, a former Dutch colony, is home to the Pipa pipa or Surinam toad, an animal that was a source of considerable fascination for European scientists because of its reproductive behaviour. During an underwater courtship, eggs are ejected by the female and fertilized by the male. The male then tramples the eggs into honeycomb-like depressions in the female's back, where a skin membrane grows over them. After 12 to 20 weeks, the young toads emerge from their mother's back. Ruysch was one of the few artists who drew the toad, present in her father’s collection, and dedicated an antire painting to the animal.
Rachel Ruysch, Nature Piece with Surinam Toad (Pipa pipa), 1690. Musée du Grand Siècle, Saint-Cloud, Département des Hauts-de-Seine.
Ruysch sold her paintings to rich collectors and European royalty for very high prices. She only needed to sell a few paintings a year. From 1708 to 1716 Ruysch worked for Johan Wilhelm, Elector Palatine—a German prince—who lived in Düsseldorf. She had a large family by then, and the prince did not make her move to Düsseldorf. He allowed her to live in Amsterdam, if she provided one painting a year. He paid her very well, so she never had any money problems. And when she won 75,000 guilders in a lottery at the age of 59, she became a rich woman herself.
