Although Rachel Ruysch is not exactly a household name, she is hardly anonymous: while she lived, she was an honored painter in the Old Masters tradition, and she has had her admirers ever since her death in 1750, at the age of eighty-three (though some sources say eighty-six). Her father was an eminent professor of anatomy and botany whose renowned collection of specimens awakened in his daughter an interest in flowers that was to be the primary focus of her life’s works.
Given Ruysch’s many fine works, one is astonished to learn that the present exhibition at the Toledo Museum of Art is the first ever devoted solely to an artist who was, in addition to much else, the court painter to the Elector Palatine, Johann Wilhelm II (1658–1716), in Düsseldorf and the first woman admitted to the artists’ guild in The Hague. And notwithstanding her prolific output, which never wavered in quality, she found time to give birth to eleven children.
Ruysch was fifteen when she was apprenticed to Willem van Aelst (1627–1683), one of the leading flower painters in Amsterdam—no small distinction in seventeenth-century Holland—and she learned from him a vividly naturalistic approach to the floral world, in which brightly illuminated bouquets emerge from a blackened background. She was the missing link between van Aelst and Jan van Huysum (1682–1749), who, although nearly two decades younger, died only a year before her; in her later works, those executed after 1700, she pioneers what might be called an Enlightenment approach to flowers that van Huysum would later make his own. There is in these later works a luminous brilliance, almost a hint of effervescence, that suggests that she has sloughed off the heaviness and high seriousness of van Aelst in favor of that brighter palette and freer spirit that one associates with the eighteenth century.
One of the most remarkable qualities of her work, throughout her career, is something that might be called the Grand Manner. This element is hard to define and yet one knows it when one sees it. That is to say that her work possesses a natural grandeur and dignity, a purity and an equilibrated nobility, that one would not immediately associate with the humble sub-genre of flower paintings. But if we feel no hesitation in attributing such lofty qualities to Cézanne, we have no reason to withhold them from Rachel Ruysch.
Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art • Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio • April 12 to July 27 • toledomuseum.org
