Rachel Ruysch was one of the most successful Dutch still life painters of the 17th and 18th centuries. Her refined paintings with colourful, lifelike flowers were among the best of the 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.
Life in The Hague and Amsterdam
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. When Ruysch was almost thirty she married the painter Jurriaan Pool (1666-1745). They had ten children, but most of them died young. Ruysch continued to paint until she was very old. At the end of her life, a collection of poems about her paintings was published. This was very unusual. No other Dutch artist had ever had this honour.
Lifelike
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’: 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.
Fictional compositions
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.
