{"id":130314,"date":"2025-09-09T13:43:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-09T13:43:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/130314\/"},"modified":"2025-09-09T13:43:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T13:43:11","slug":"the-redisovery-of-rachel-ruysch-a-forgotten-dutch-golden-age-master","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/130314\/","title":{"rendered":"The redisovery of Rachel Ruysch, a forgotten Dutch Golden Age master"},"content":{"rendered":"

Her father, Dr. Frederick Ruysch, a biologist, stacked their Amsterdam home with specimens \u2013 little animal corpses in fluid-filled jars, bugs pinned neatly in grids. In the 17th century, Dutch explorers were hauling back all kinds of exotica from colonies in Africa and the Americas, prompting wonder and fascination with the alien lands beyond the sea. <\/p>\n

\"RachelRachel Ruysch: Artist, Naturalist, and Pioneer exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, BostonMuseum of Fine Arts, Boston<\/p>\n

Ruysch grew up with all of this in front of her face every day: Gargantuan beetles from the Amazon pinned in tidy grids, every manner of dazzlingly creepy reptile bobbing in jars. The MFA approximates those formative years in a dazzling entry gallery, lit like a sideshow of macabre delight. A bridled skink floats in a jar of preservative, one of four reptilian cadavers positioned right in the middle of the room. Nearby, cobalt-winged butterflies \u2013 morpho deidamia, native to tropical zones in Central and South America \u2013 line up in tidy rows alongside their radiant-winged insect kin, pinned on dark wood-framed linen. (For all this, the MFA has Harvard\u2019s Museum of Zoology to thank). <\/p>\n

They share the spotlight with a fireworks display of some of Ruysch\u2019s most captivating works. \u201cFruit Still Life with Stag Beetle and Nest,\u201d 1717, feels cinematic, a luxuriant, shadowy canvas aglow like a stage set where the artist has constructed a tabletop drama of decadence and decay: A plum, split roughly open to expose its meaty innards, lures a bright blue lizard from the shadows; a leggy dragonfly hovers over a melon; a stag beetle, oily-slick with long black horn-like antennae, probes the outer rim of a bird\u2019s nest full of eggs. Pomegranate seeds spill alongside the eggs, a signal, maybe, of overripeness or rot. A tableau of earthly riches, the whole scene seems poised on the edge of chaos, a moment before the proverbial plague of locusts swoops in to strip it to the bones. <\/p>\n

\"RachelRachel Ruysch, “Forest Still Life with Stag Beetle and Nest,” 1717. Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe.Fischer-Kohler<\/p>\n

I\u2019m projecting, maybe, but there\u2019s a dynamism to Ruysch\u2019s observation that\u2019s entirely her own. I tend to think of painting in the Dutch Golden Age \u2013 a moment of sudden, burgeoning wealth as the empire expanded rapidly, spawning a moneyed class of merchants and plantation owners \u2013 as a genteel practice of patron-pleasing. <\/p>\n

Portraiture, surely, was important to a blossoming new bourgeoisie, whose wealth liberated the practice from regents and monarchs who, to that point, were really the only ones who could afford it. But still life painting played its role as flattery for the newly-rich, too. It tended to be laden with signifiers of worldly sources of wealth: Sugar, say, a luxury extracted from South American plantations, in a Chinoiserie dish signalling the patron\u2019s trade in the far east. And then, there was simple abundance \u2013 fruit and game in decadent heaps, its excess alone a signal that the patron could afford to indulge, and to waste. <\/p>\n

In Ruysch\u2019s work, such self-regard never comes to mind. Homage and service is replaced with the riotous curiousity of an active mind trying to capture the shock of the new in a world freshly without limits. The stream of strange specimens paraded into her home made her keenly aware of this, a distinction she shared with a small community of woman botanists she spent time with. While conventional tabletop mise-en-scenes might have been arranged just so, hers are infused with the chaos of a world tipping alarmingly out of balance. <\/p>\n

\"RachelRachel Ruysch, “Still Life of Exotic Flowers on a Marble Ledge,” about 1735. The Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri.Nelson-Atkins Media Services \/ Rick Andersen<\/p>\n

Was she alarmed? I think so. The MFA exhibition cannily titles part of its tale \u201cFlowers of Empire,\u201d suggesting an incisive view of the sudden collision of worlds mostly being celebrated for the wealth it brought. There is no looking away from the startling incongruities of her \u201cStill Life of Exotic Flowers on a Marble Ledge,\u201d 1735, and no way to regard it as mere confection. A teeming mass of texture and color, plant matter bunched and splayed in a chaotic heap, can\u2019t-miss elements draw the eye to their conspicuous oddity: The prickly fingers of cactus creeping out from beneath a dessicated frond like an alien creature; a yellowy moth poised at the sickly petals of a carrion flower, gray as zombie skin and named for its foul stench of death. <\/p>\n

On the wall nearby, Harvard\u2019s Charles Davis Lab for plant diversity provides a map and key for the origins of each one of the flora in the piece (there are 21 distinct species in this one frame), tracking each to the far reaches of the Dutch empire \u2013 the Americas to Africa to Asia. But you don\u2019t need a degree in botany to know a cactus is not Dutch. Nor, it turns out, is the carrion flower, native to Southern Africa, or the Devil\u2019s Trumpet, which flourishes in Central America. <\/p>\n

That particular bloom centers the frame, slender, sinister, sinuous. Was it a coincidence that Ruysch gave it top billing, knowing \u2013 as a child of science \u2013 that it festered with psychoactive poison, liable to provoke arrhythmias, hallucinations, psychosis, and even death? Let\u2019s allow an educated guess: Ruysch, hyper-aware of Dutch hothouses filled with plants from faraway lands changing the biome of colonial Holland, made space in her mind, and her work, for the perils of progress alongside its bounty. <\/p>\n

\""Rachel“Rachel Ruysch: Artist, Naturalist, and Pioneer” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston<\/p>\n

A painter-naturalist, she found herself in an increasingly unnatural world, where the frictions of an old order marauding its way through a new world, taking what it pleased, were becoming clear. Flowers are an allegory; their decadence, to me, parallels the arrogance of conquest. The rot, the stench, the toxic peril of it all, was its harvest. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s partly why, as her fame grew, Ruysch\u2019s notable drift towards convention feels so deflating. In 1708, she became a court painter to Johann Wilhelm, a German powerbroker married to Anna Maria Luisa de\u2019 Medici (yes, those Medicis), and the niceties of court life lead her to sand down her edges. \u201cBouquet of Flowers,\u201d 1708, her audition for the job, is a virtuosic masterpiece filled with painterly flourish \u2013 cut stems in a glass vase shimmering sunshine reflected from across the room, moths and dragonflies flitting across the cascade of floral opulence. <\/p>\n

\"RachelRachel Ruysch , “Fruit Piece,” 1709. Bayerische Staatsgem\u00e4ldesammlungen M\u00fcnchen \u2013 Schloss Nymphenburg.Sibylle Forster<\/p>\n

Masterful as it is \u2014 I defy you to find a brushstroke in its uncanny sheen \u2014 there are no sour notes. It\u2019s a painting made to please, and feels like it. But she finds her feet in \u201cStill Life With Fruit and Flowers,\u201d 1714, her biggest painting, said to have hung over Wilhelm\u2019s bed. This is more like it: A mound of flowers wilt and swoon in an unearthly glare; brittle wisps of dead long grasses rear up, broken, from the forest floor. A split-open pomegranate glistens like a disembowelment; a melon with a long fleshy gash in its shell seethes like a fresh wound. In one dark corner, a lizard rears up to snap at a fly; above, a bird hunkers deep in its nest to protect its eggs from a sinuous blue skink lurking nearby. Nature is fecund, and wondrous, and dangerous; it consumes and lives and dies. It\u2019s a glorious drama, the cycle of life, all in a single frame. <\/p>\n

In 1716, Wilhelm dies, and Rusych, patronless, fades from view. (She also had 10 children, so there\u2019s that.) But in the 1730s, she returns, and with perspective that only years of observation can bring. That remarkable painting of the collision of global flora is from that moment, 1735; the elderly Ruysch, observing the longer arc of empire, sees its complexities like few others. <\/p>\n

A final gallery of small works bids her farewell, her diminishing powers ending things with a whimper (she died at 86; her final work is here, a small panel from 1748 of flowers and melon, she inscribed with her signature and her age, 83). But I prefer to remember her in the height of her powers, where art, through science, allowed her to capture a world in wild upheaval with a clarity all her own. <\/p>\n

RACHEL RUYSCH: ARTIST, NATURALIST, PIONEER<\/p>\n

Through December 7. Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 465 Huntington Ave, 617-267-9300,www.mfa.org<\/a><\/p>\n

Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com<\/a>. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte<\/a>.<\/p>\n