Rachel Ruysch’s Still Lifes, from the Dutch Golden Age, Are Both Sensuous and Scientific

Pure pleasure abounds in Rachel Ruysch’s paintings on view at the Toledo Museum of Art—the first major exhibition dedicated to this extraordinary artist, organized with the Alte Pinakothek in Munich and traveling next to the MFA Boston. The visual splendor of this Dutch Golden Age painter’s work, featuring gorgeous arrays of fruits and flowers animated by buzzing insects, delights in tableau after tableau. Darkened backgrounds heighten the impact of deeply saturated hues of every conceivable color, painted with such an exquisite touch that one might be tempted to reach across and wipe away a drop of gathering dew.

The canvases are pleasurable but also restlessly ambitious, as Ruysch herself was. She combined a dazzling number of blooms in overflowing arrangements that include tulips, marigolds, roses, irises, lilies, anemones, and even an ear of corn, all of which appear to be stretching to reach beyond the bounds of their frames.

Is it trivial to think of flowers in times like these? Writer Elaine Scarry has claimed that “of all the objects in the world, flowers are the most beautiful.” Beauty, for Scarry, bears a direct relationship to justice: It is a reminder of our vulnerability, our susceptibility to something outside ourselves. Beauty is a crucial element of our aliveness. And like life itself, the beauty of Ruysch’s arrangements is thrown into relief—and made more precious—by the certainty of death. Stems are snapped. Leaves yellow and wilt. A lizard prepares to pounce on a nest of freshly lain eggs.

Unlike the symbolic memento mori of many still lifes, Ruysch’s investment in the cycle of life seems to come from her involvement in ongoing scientific research. Ruysch’s father was a scholar with a collection of natural history specimens so renowned that Peter the Great eventually purchased it. Ruysch had bees, beetles, and butterflies readily available to study. She also had access to Amsterdam’s growing botanical collections, for which her father had edited a catalog.

It’s worth noting that Ruysch was hardly the only woman painting in the 17th century. Curator Robert Schindler’s rediscovery of the little-known work of Rachel’s sister, Anna, was one impetus for organizing this show, and placing works by the sisters side-by-side, the exhibition shows the extent to which they were in dialogue. A section dedicated to scientific illustration also includes examples by several other female artists, including Maria Sibylla Merian who, at the age of 52, traveled to the Dutch colony of Suriname in South America to study insects. Scientists at this time were particularly interested in different forms of biological reproduction, leading to a widespread fascination with the Surinam toad, which carries its eggs on its back. Ruysch’s father had an embalmed specimen, and Ruysch illustrated it in a letter that was sent to the Royal Society in London, putting her at the center of scientific communication at the highest levels.

This exhibition significantly advances the scholarship on Ruysch’s career. The curators collaborated with botanical experts to inventory the many species Ruysch depicted for the exhibition catalog. This research reveals the rise in the 1690s of non-native specimens as Dutch trading networks thrived. Plants from at least five different continents appear in her arrangements, including passionflower, cacti, and the stinking carrion flower (Orbea variegata, native to South Africa, for which the museum has provided an olfactory sample). These are inherently global paintings, products of histories of colonialism and trade that are inseparable from the history of art.

For all their lavish abundance, Ruysch’s arrangements are also emphatically tenuous things. There is little to anchor their elements in place: The loose gather of thin rope in her first major work, Swag of Flowers and Fruit Suspended in Front of a Niche (1681), hardly seems up to the task of containing its bounty. We can easily imagine the elements of her pictures slipping out of the perfect alignment into which she has willed them. On occasion, she further tempts fate by perching an insect on an already drooping stem, as with the Garden Tiger moth atop a fine sprig of wheat in Flowers in a Glass Vase (1704); the moth encourages us to consider the effects of gravity on these elaborately constructed worlds. In a 1692 portrait of Ruysch at work by Michiel van Musscher (the curators argue she painted this scene’s floral arrangement), she is deliberately pinching a bloom into place, gazing casually at the viewer in full cognizance of her own talent. Out of an array of source material before her, including cut flowers and botanical illustrations, Ruysch assembles something that is much more than the sum of its parts.

The world holds together in its wondrous beauty, Ruysch’s work suggests, because we will it to be so. In the powerful economic hub of 17th-century Amsterdam, it’s easy to see how she might have felt this way. The damage wrought by such hubris is now obvious, and it can be tempting to leave nature to its own devices in response. Ruysch invites us to think about what might be lost if we let go.