This biography is republished in full with kind permission from The Art Story – Rachel Ruysch.
Born: 3 June 1664, Netherlands
Died: 12 August 1750
Country most active: Netherlands
Also known as: NA
Rachel Ruysch was a Dutch painter who, with Jan van Huysum, is the most celebrated exponent of still lifes and flower pieces to emerge during the Dutch Golden Age. She painted elegant bouquets and dark forest flora with such attention to detail, and such delicacy of colour, they are considered amongst the very finest pieces in the long tradition of Dutch still life painting. A successful and celebrated artist in her own lifetime, she was the first female member inducted into The Hague’s painter’s society, was then appointed court painter to the Elector Palatine in Düsseldorf and accepted many prominent commissions from international patrons (including Cosimo III de’ Medici). Ruysch remained artistically active throughout her long life and proudly inscribed her age (83) on of one her last canvases.
Childhood
Rachel Ruysch had a unique upbringing which saw her raised in an environment of art and science. One of twelve siblings, she was born to Frederik Ruysch, an eccentric anatomist and botanist, and Maria Post, whose father (Rachel’s grandfather) was the renowned imperial architect Pieter Post, and whose brother (Rachel’s great uncle) was the leading landscape painter, Frans Post. They were a prominent and wealthy family who relocated from The Hague to Amsterdam, where they lived on Bloemgracht (the “flower canal”), a popular location for visiting artists. Frederik took up the position of Amsterdam’s praelector (college officer) of anatomy in 1667, and later professor of botany at the city’s botanical garden.
Frederik collected a variety of unique natural specimens – plants, animals, insects, human body parts – for his cabinet of curiosities, which occupied five whole rooms of their home. He had developed a new method of embalmment, which allowed him to preserve organic matter in a seemingly natural state. Indeed, Ruysch’s father was famed for his cabinet curiosities and would artfully pose his collection of embalmed and wax-injected organs, animals, plants, and body parts in macabre dioramas (such as a severed child’s hand and forearm hand holding a hatching turtle egg). Frederik would proudly present his curious memento mori (death mementoes) to invited foreign visitors and young Rachel enjoyed drawing these objects, which she learned to do with a high degree of accuracy. Her drawings were used by Frederik (himself a competent draftsman) for cataloging purposes.
Frederick was an admirer of Otto Marseus van Schrieck, a painter from Nijmegen, who had served at royal courts in France and Tuscany. He was well known for his paintings of reptiles and insects who populated the world of plants, shrubs, moss and fungi. In Italy this style of forest floor painting was called sottobosco (or bosgrondjes, in the Netherlands). On the event of van Schrieck’s passing (in 1678) Frederik acquired several of his paintings as well as numerous insect specimens. Rachel scrutinized these artworks, and her earliest paintings demonstrate van Schrieck’s influence.
Although he was himself a decent enough draftsman, the art historian Marsha Meskimmon notes that it is vital not to overlook the importance of Rachel’s influence on her father’s drawings: “published images were a crucial means of disseminating scientific knowledge throughout Europe in the period and Rachel’s contribution to this facet of Frederick’s practice was quite valuable […] visual exchanges between anatomical cabinet and still-life painting developed, both laden with symbols for moral contemplation while also presenting specimens for detailed observation”.
Education
When she was fifteen, Frederik permitted his daughter to be apprenticed to renowned flower and still life painter Willem van Aelst, whose Amsterdam studio looked out over the studio of flower painter Maria van Oosterwick. Ruysch studied with van Aelst for four years (until his passing). He not only taught her to paint, but also to arrange flowers so that they would look less contrived. The art historian Barbara Morgan writes, “[Van Aelst] was famous for creating elaborate still-life paintings that featured spiralling compositions and eschewed the convention of symmetrical arrangements of depicted bouquets. [His] somewhat irregular approach translated itself into the works of his pupils. Among them were Ruysch, [Ernst] Stuven, and Ruysch’s younger sister Anna Elisabeth, who also became an artist of recognized merit, although she never attained the stature of her more determined sister”. By the age of eighteen, Ruysch was already making a name (and living) for herself while rubbing shoulders with the city’s most popular flower painters and horticulturists.
Mature Period
The chance to study and develop her own painting career set Ruysch apart from most women of her time. While her choice to paint flowers and still lifes was deemed “appropriate” subject matter for women artists, still life painting had grown in popularity as a genre. As historian Lynn Robinson states: “In 1648, the Netherlands became independent from Spain, ushering in a period of great economic prosperity. Flourishing international trade and a thriving capitalistic economy resulted in a newly affluent middle class. Wealthy merchants created a new kind of patronage and art market. Without a powerful monarchy or the Catholic Church to commission artworks (the Dutch were Protestants), artists produced directly for buyers. Like today, buyers purchased art either from professional dealers or from the artist in their studios. Subjects like big historical, mythological or religious paintings were no longer desired; buyers wanted portraits, still lifes, landscapes and genre paintings (scenes of everyday life) to decorate their homes. Proud of their newly independent country and trade wealth, they desired artworks that would reflect their success”.
Ruysch’s career ran parallel to the growth of the country’s burgeoning horticultural industry and a fervent interest in the science of botany. Robinson writes that the Netherland’s became “the largest importers of new and exotic plants and flowers from around the world”. Where previously valued by the markets for their medicinal uses, flowers became desirable commodities highly prized for their simple beauty and fine fragrance.
Botanists and gardeners sought the rarest specimens imported from overseas trade and tulips – “coveted for their intense and unusually varied colors” – were prized above all others. (Imported initially from Turkey in the late sixteenth century, the Netherland’s had recently experienced a period referred to as “Tulip Mania”. Robinson writes that “Tulip bulbs were so avidly desired in 17th century Netherlands that […] Buyers bought bulbs still in the ground, speculating that they would be worth more in the future and could then be sold for a large profit. However, in 1637, “investors suddenly decided that tulip bulbs were grossly overpriced […] Prices plummeted, tulip bulbs lost 90% of their earlier value, and the market crashed. The world had just experienced its first financial bubble”.)
In 1693, Ruysch married the successful portrait painter (and adopted son of Mignon), Juriaen Pool. The couple would go on to have ten children. Despite being more than occupied with her domestic situation (and even if the family’s status suggested they were very likely to have had hired domestic help), Ruysch continued to paint, producing over 250 paintings over seven decades. Her painting career brought in steady income for the family, with Ruysch earning, on average, more per painting during her lifetime than even Rembrandt. As Morgan writes, “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 1750, her artfulness ‘was all the more astonishing and to be praised in women, who by nature are destined to other occupations’. Despite such gendered trepidations, Ruysch earned international renown for her expertly wrought and pleasingly arranged creations”.
Ruysch became a member of “independent” Confrerie Pictura society between 1701-08, and, in 1709, she achieved the honor of becoming the first female member of The Hague’s artist’s society, The Guild of St. Luke (the very society to which members of Confrerie Pictura had been opposed). Between 1708 to 1716, she served as court painter to Johan Willem, Elector Palatine of Bavaria, who resided in Düsseldorf. It was at the elector’s court, writes Morgan, that “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”.
Ruysch’s youngest child, a boy, was born when she was 47 and she decided to call him Jan Willem in honor of Palatine, and who, with his wife, agreed to act as the boy’s godparents. When Ruysch travelled to Düsseldorf to introduce them to their godchild, Johann Wilhelm presented him with a valuable medallion on a red ribbon while Ruysch was gifted a 28-piece silver toilet set in a decorative toilet case featuring six decorative silver sconces.
Late Period
It is widely believed that, while court painters were expected to relocate, Ruysch commanded such respect she was permitted to stay with her family in Amsterdam. This view is, however, contradicted by Morgan who states that the family did in fact move to Düsseldorf where they lived between 1708-16. In either case, Ruysch continued to paint for both the Elector and many wealthy Dutch patrons during her tenure as court painter. Morgan writes in fact that, “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 settled permanently in Amsterdam, Ruysch accepted commissions from many prominent domestic and international patrons, including Cosimo III de’ Medici, and, according to historian Dániel Margócsy, refused “to adapt [her] work and personal identity to the desires of a particular patron”.
In the spring of 1711, Ruysch was visited by a German scholar, Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach. She had recently completed paintings for Pieter de la Court van der Voort, a cloth merchant from Leiden (who paid Ruysch the princely sum of 1,500 guilders; a stipend many times greater than the average annual salary). Von Uffenbach commented enthusiastically on the “exceptionally delicate brushwork” and noted that while working on two small square panels for Cosimo de’ Medici, she had surrounded herself with “all kinds of birds’ nests, insects and suchlike”.
Juriaen had been commissioned by the Elector to paint his wife’s portrait, though he turned it into a family portrait, painting Rachel and himself with Jan Willem presenting his mother with the medallion he had been given by the Elector (his godfather). The painting was completed in 1716 as news broke that the Elector had died. Although Ruysch had lost her most important patron, she was still kept busy with commissions. The family was well off (they had already won two hundred guilders on the lottery in 1713) but in December 1722 they bought a ten-guilder lottery ticket that won the first prize of 75,000 guilders. The family’s good fortune was offset with tragedy, however, with the loss of seven of their teen and early adult aged children by 1731.
In 1750 Ruysch’s life was celebrated by the state with the collection “Dichtlovers voor de uitmuntende schilderessen Mejufvrouwe Rachel Ruisch” (“Poems for the excellent painter Mistress Rachel Ruysch”). It was an anthology, the first of its kind for a Dutch artist, that brought together verse by eleven contemporary poets who celebrated her life and works. Rachel Ruysch died later that year, she was 85 years old.
The Legacy of Rachel Ruysch
Ruysch established herself as the preeminent painter of flowers, capturing, and indeed immortalizing, the beauty of, what were to the new Dutch Republic, perishable luxury goods. Today art historians laud her as one of the most important still life painters – male or female – in the history of the genre. Although flower painting became unfashionable soon after her death, Ruysch’s legacy was carried forward by Jan van Huysum, now regarded as the last of the great Dutch still life painters. Moreover, Ruysch takes her place in the pantheon as one of the few women of the Dutch Golden Age, placing her in the company of other accomplished women artists of the period, including Judith Leyster, Clara Peeters, and Maria van Oosterwyck.
Morgan writes, “Her paintings were more than just realistic and scientifically accurate depictions. Ruysch possessed excellent skill and technique […] She used form, color and textures in ways that were innovative, bold, and dynamic”. She adds that Ruysch’s “open, diagonal compositions contrasted with the more compact and symmetrical arrangements than those of the other early 17th century women painters”. Her compositions were more asymmetrical “loose” and “spontaneous” than those of her peers but that this “informality was carefully designed to achieve the ultimate effect. The end result was that her works possessed more energy and created the illusion of immediate realism”, so much so, that a viewer of her paintings “could almost reach out and touch her bouquets”.