Rachel Ruysch

Elizabeth Honig's review of the 2024-25 exhibition catalogue says the book illustrates or mentions about half of the over 150 works by Ruysch that survive. She adds that there had been no monograph on the painter for almost seventy years, and that the dissertation on her early work has never been published. Her footnote names the two works she means: Maurice H. Grant, Rachel Ruysch, 1664-1750 (Leigh-on-Sea, 1956) and Marianne Berardi's 1998 Pittsburgh thesis Science into Art. The Dutch women's dictionary, in its list of works, simply sends the reader to Berardi.

The exhibition at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, the Toledo Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, showed 57 paintings by Ruysch. The Art Newspaper's reviewer calls that over a third of her surviving work, which fits the 150-odd figure. Wikipedia gives a different count, more than 250 documented or attributed, without saying what separates the two numbers. The likeliest reading is that 150 counts pictures that exist and that the larger figure adds works known only from inventories and sale records, but no source says so and this page doesn't claim it.

Grant's catalogue numbers are cited by auction houses to this day, and the citations show its limits. When Sotheby's sold the 1710 flower piece in 2013 its catalogue entry recorded that Grant had confused the provenance of two of his own entries, and that Hofstede de Groot's 1928 Verzeichnis had listed the picture under the wrong entry as well. The painting's modern identification with a pair recorded in a Leiden inventory was confirmed for Sotheby's by Berardi.

The Dutch women's dictionary, written by Luuc Kooijmans, sets the scene. Her father Frederik Ruysch was professor of anatomy and botany in Amsterdam and kept a famous collection of preparations, insects and plants. Her mother Maria Post was the daughter of the architect Pieter Post. By fourteen she was painting animals and plants so well that her parents let her study with a painter, which the dictionary calls unusual for a girl. Otto Marseus van Schrieck, who had made the dark-corner genre of snakes, toads and insects fashionable in Amsterdam, was dead by then. She went instead to Willem van Aelst, whom the dictionary calls the best still-life painter in Amsterdam and a friend of her parents. Sotheby's gives the apprenticeship as 1679 to 1683.

The dictionary describes her early method in practical terms. She laid out the main lines of a composition and waited for the paint to dry, then added insects, grass blades and tiny flowers with a very fine brush. She used small sponges dipped in paint to build the texture of moss, and sometimes real moss to make imprints, as Marseus and Van Aelst had done. She combined plants and animals that never meet in nature, and she worked from models in her father's collection rather than from the open field. The dictionary adds that Frederik Ruysch could preserve flowers so that they kept the look of bloom, which let her compose bouquets of species that flower in different seasons. That last claim is the dictionary's and rests on no technical study that this page has found.

The National Gallery in London makes the same point about out-of-season bouquets from the other side. It says painters of the period stored detailed sketches made when each flower was in bloom and assembled them later, and then admits that why they did so is less clear. Its own offered reasons are a gradual tradition, a taste for varied shapes and colours, or a picture of the whole richness of two seasons passing.

The catalogue of the 2024-25 exhibition places her in the scientific life of Amsterdam. Honig reports that Anna Knaap argued her production belongs inside the horticultural networks of the day, where women played real roles and new plants kept arriving from the Dutch colonies. Knaap's chosen example is a still life with cactus in a blue vase, one of several pictures that include only imported plants. The Leiden botanical garden, Honig notes citing Knaap, held 1,100 species in 1600, 3,000 in 1685 and 7,000 in 1740. Honig adds that Pieter de la Court in Leiden, a figure in horticulture, commissioned pictures from Ruysch.

Two other essays in the same book, as Honig describes them, are arguments by named scholars and should be read that way. Bert van de Roemer compares the kind of immortality Frederik Ruysch's preservation techniques gave anatomical and botanical specimens with the eternal blooms of Rachel's pictures. The biologist Charles Davis inventoried the species in sixteen of her paintings and found the highest plant diversity in the middle of her career, with one picture from late in that period holding 36 species. These are modern readings. No letter, inventory or contract that this page has seen records Ruysch stating what her flower pictures meant.

Critics also differ on whether the flowers carry a memento mori. The Art Newspaper quotes Andreas Kilb in the Frankfurter Allgemeine saying her flowers are not a memento mori, though death shares the stage with the beauty. The same review's own author wonders whether the work is merely decorative. The National Gallery's page offers the Protestant view that the study of nature was a gift from God and says no more. Honig reads her as appreciated and collected in part for her response to the new botany; no source records the maker's own account.

The Dutch women's dictionary gives the terms. Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine, visited Frederik Ruysch's museum in the summer of 1695 and undoubtedly saw Rachel's work. In 1708 she was offered the post of court painter. With a large family she was reluctant to move to Dusseldorf, and she was exempted from the residence obligation, as the dictionary notes Adriaan van der Werff and Jan Weenix also were. She received an annual stipend, for which she had to make only one painting a year for the collection of the Elector and his wife. She travelled to Dusseldorf a couple of times to deliver pictures.

The dictionary gives the personal detail. Her last child, a boy, was born when she was 47 and she named him Jan Willem after her patron, who with his wife agreed to be godparent. On a visit to show the child she was given a dressing table with a 28-piece silver toilet set and six silver sconces, and the boy received a costly medallion on a red ribbon. Jurriaan Pool was commissioned to paint her portrait and turned it into a family picture with the medallion. It was complete in 1716 and packed for shipment when news came that the Elector had died.

The Art Newspaper says the Elector's collection formed a pillar of the Alte Pinakothek's holdings. It reports a 1714 flower and fruit picture, four feet wide and now in Augsburg, that once decorated Johann Wilhelm's bedchamber, and Honig says the Elector kept several of her paintings in that room. Sotheby's names a pair painted for him in 1709, now in Munich. A second court sat behind the first. The dictionary says she was painting two small square panels for Cosimo de' Medici, the Elector's father-in-law, in 1711. Sotheby's says the pair on panel is still in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence and that a pair she painted in 1716 hangs there too.

On 14 March 1711 the German traveller Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach called on the Pools in Amsterdam. Sotheby's 2013 catalogue prints a translation of what he wrote afterwards. He saw two pictures waiting for a Mr de la Court in Leiden, one of flowers and one of fruit, and records that the buyer paid her 1,500 guilders. He also records her saying she can't paint much more than two paintings in a year, and that she delivers one every year to the Elector Palatine, from whom she receives a pension.

The buyer was Pieter de la Court van der Voort, a cloth merchant who settled in Leiden in 1686 and amassed an art collection. His own inventory of 1731, quoted in the same catalogue, describes a flower piece and its pendant fruit piece painted for him, kept in his house and still awaiting further looking over and improvement, at 650 guilders each; Sotheby's reads this as Ruysch visiting him in Leiden to touch them up. His son Allard's inventory of December 1749 gives 650 guilders each or 1,300 for the two. Sotheby's sets the traveller's 1,500 against the family's 1,300 and prefers the family inventories. No source explains the difference, and this page does not. The Dutch women's dictionary prints Uffenbach's figure without the family's.

The same picture's later prices show how the numbers moved. It was sold at the Leiden sale of the widow Catherina de la Court van der Voort-Backer on 8-9 September 1766, lot 103, for 1,015 guilders to the dealer de Winter, perhaps acting for the Leipzig collector Gottfried Winckler. It then reappeared in the London sale of Lesser Lesser at Christie's on 10 February 1912, lot 95, with its pendant, for 200 guineas to Shepherd. It sold again at Sotheby's London on 3 July 2013 (see the market section).

A 2025 article in the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art by the Mauritshuis conservators Marya Albrecht and Sabrina Meloni reports on the grounds of eighty-three still lifes in that museum, studied by microscopy, infrared reflectography, X-radiography, X-ray fluorescence and cross-sections. Its table lists Ruysch's Vase with Flowers, signed "Rachel Ruysch F: 1700", on canvas, 79.5 by 60.2 cm, inventory 151, with a double ground. Both layers are dark brown, built from earth pigments, chalk and lead white, and the upper layer holds more and finer particles of lead white than the lower one. The article's wider finding is that several painters used a remarkably dark upper ground and left it uncovered in places as a backdrop, though a dark gray upper ground under the whole picture appears in only three of the eighty-three.

The study finds ten canvases with a gray layer over a red one, all from the northern Netherlands between about 1650 and 1680, and reads it as evidence of local preference. Ruysch's 1700 picture isn't one of them. The article discusses her only in its table, so it draws no conclusion about where or from whom she bought her canvas.

She signed and dated, and late in life she added her age. Sotheby's offered in 2019 a flower piece inscribed "R Ruysch 1745 81 Jaren" and noted that the age suggests pride in still producing such quality after eighty. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston bought a small panel of 1742 inscribed with her name, the date and the age of 79, according to the National Gallery of Ireland's curator Lizzie Marx.

Anna Ruysch, her younger sister (baptised December 1666), trained in the same circle. Honig reports that Robert Schindler's catalogue essay shows numerous works by Anna's hand and suggests she might have collaborated on some of Rachel's larger and more demanding works, against the usual view of Anna as a fairly amateur imitator. The Art Newspaper's reviewer calls her a mysterious-sounding sister who painted floral still lifes nearly indistinguishable from Rachel's. Wikipedia, citing the same Dutch dictionary, says fewer than ten pictures are attributed to Anna with certainty because she rarely signed, and records her sales at 50,900 pounds in 2007 and 201,600 and 327,000 pounds in 2022. That is a tertiary summary of dealers' and auction-house claims.

Honig adds a second doubt, from the inventory side: Bernd Ebert questions whether all the Ruysch pictures listed in princely inventories were really by her. The 1692 portrait now in the Metropolitan Museum shows another kind of shared hand. Michiel van Musscher painted the sitter at her easel and Ruysch painted the flowers and other still-life elements around her. The Met's curator Adam Eaker, quoted in Hyperallergic, says collaborations of this sort were a game in which connoisseurs showed they could tell the hands apart. A third contributor remains unnamed: the open book in the foreground is signed "De Vree".

Her husband Jurriaan Pool is the other documented painter in the house. The dictionary says he claimed his wife's brushwork surpassed that of all masters past and present, and that he painted the family picture of 1716. Whether he or anyone else ever touched her flower pieces is unrecorded in anything this page has seen.

Ruysch was copied during her lifetime or soon after, and the copies are catalogued in public collections. The Ashmolean in Oxford holds a panel of 1716 listed as after Ruysch, recorded at the Netherlands Institute for Art History as number 193054. It repeats the Rijksmuseum's signed canvas of the same year in composition. Wikipedia names Catharina Backer, daughter-in-law of Pieter de la Court van der Voort, as a well-documented copyist and says she owned two of Ruysch's large paired canvases. That comes from a tertiary summary of a Dutch dictionary entry that this page hasn't traced to its primary source.

The Metropolitan Museum's first Ruysch, acquired in 1871, was later found to be a copy, according to Hyperallergic's report. In 2023 the Met bought the 1692 portrait, which Hyperallergic calls its first painting by her. The 2024-25 catalogue includes an essay by Josephina de Fouw, Nouchka de Keyser and Jorinde Koenen reporting that a portrait of a nineteenth-century collector was painted over a work by Ruysch that he owned, as Honig describes it.

A wartime question is unresolved. In September 2025 the research group ARCA published an inquiry on its blog. By overlaying photographs of a still life that the Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo in Buenos Aires attributes to Ruysch on the Dutch record photograph of a wartime loss listed as by Abraham Mignon, ARCA says it suspects they are the same painting under different attributions. It notes that the recorded widths differ, and that attributions are seldom definitive and may be reassessed. No museum, registry or court has ruled, and this page does not. The earliest images of the Buenos Aires picture that ARCA found date to 2007 and the museum's donation date is given as 1960, 1962 or 1964 in different sources.

The dictionary says Ruysch and Pool won 200 guilders in the lotteries of the States of Holland in 1713. In December 1722 they and their son George bought a lot for ten guilders and won the first prize of 75,000 guilders. Honig, summarising Schindler, also gives 75,000 guilders in 1723. The National Gallery of Ireland's article gives the same event as 60,000 guilders. The year also differs: December 1722 in the dictionary and the National Gallery of Ireland's article, 1723 in Honig and the Art Newspaper. The dictionary lists notarial acts from 1723 in the Amsterdam archive, which are where the question could be settled.

George died three years later at 25, and by the dictionary's count the couple had lost two adult sons in a few years, one of them Abraham, who died in Guinea in the service of the West India Company in 1720. In 1734 they agreed to let their eldest son Frederik sell his mother's paintings. In 1743 she wrote of her second son Isaac's behaviour with the deepest sadness, and in 1749 she said the friendship between her and all her children was restored. The Art Newspaper says she all but gave up painting for over a decade after the win, which sits oddly beside dated pictures of 1741, 1742 and 1745.

The dictionary also records that the biographer Johan van Gool met her in 1748 at 84 and found that most of her paintings had been sent abroad. She showed him a picture begun the year before. In 1750 she was given a collection of verses written about her work, which the dictionary calls a unique gesture for a Dutch artist. She died on 12 October that year. The dictionary cites Abraham Bredius's Kunstler-Inventare 4, pages 1203-1209, among its archival sources. This page has not opened that volume and gives no inventory contents.

Sotheby's says eleven contemporary poets paid tribute to her and that van Gool wrote her biography in the Nieuw Schouburg of 1750. Honig adds that the poems were published in her lifetime, possibly with a nudge from her son Frederik, and that many of the poets were up-and-coming women writers. Honig says her works were collected and admired by the urban and courtly elites of Europe.

Then the record thins. Honig says every historian of Dutch art knows the name and few know much about her, and she calls the scholarly neglect a stark contrast with her lifetime esteem. The Art Newspaper's reviewer calls her a footnote and a major painter of what amounts to a minor sub-genre. The Met bought its portrait in 2023 and the National Gallery of Ireland bought a flower piece signed and dated 1742 in the same year. Boston bought a 1742 panel the same year.

Nobody has replaced Grant's catalogue. Honig calls the 2024-25 book a key text on Ruysch for a long time, and she treats it as an independent book rather than a catalogue of the exhibition alone. It is not described as a catalogue of all her works.