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Still Life with Flowers on a Marble Slab
Still Life with Flowers on a Marble Slab. Rachel Ruysch · Public domain · source

Rachel Ruysch

Public domain1664-1750·Dutch·painting·Wikipedia ↗

Who

Born in The Hague on 3 June 1664, the daughter of the Amsterdam anatomist and botanist Frederik Ruysch. At fifteen she was apprenticed to the flower painter Willem van Aelst, and she painted flower and fruit still lifes for more than six decades. She married the portrait painter Juriaen Pool in 1693, raised ten children, and died in Amsterdam on 12 October 1750.

Why they matter

She was a celebrity in her own lifetime, and paid like one: her flower pieces sold for 750 to 1,200 guilders while Rembrandt typically got about 500 a painting. Her bouquets are botanically impossible, flowers from different seasons in one vase, but every petal and insect is painted with a naturalist's accuracy; she grew up in a house her father had turned into a natural history museum. In 1701 she was the first woman admitted to the Confrerie Pictura in The Hague, and from 1708 until his death in 1716 she was court painter to the Elector Palatine, Johann Wilhelm, in Dusseldorf.

What to buy

Prints: the National Gallery in London prints its Flowers in a Vase, of about 1685, to order on art paper or stretched canvas, framed or not, from its own photography. A Ruysch lives on the fine detail of petals and insects, so that museum-made giclee is the print to have. The Rijksmuseum publishes its own photographs of its Ruysch still lifes as free public-domain downloads, which a good print shop can work from. Books: Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art, edited by Anna C. Knaap, Bernd Ebert and Robert Schindler and published by MFA Publications for the 2024-25 exhibition in Munich, Toledo and Boston, is the standard book now; the MFA calls it the first monograph on her in over 70 years, and it won the George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award. Originals: not realistic. The major pictures are in museums, and flower pieces by her circle and followers need a specialist before anyone believes a signature.

Notes

The Rijksmuseum's Still Life with Flowers on a Marble Tabletop (1716) holds more than ten species of flowers in bloom at different times of year and teems with insects. Her younger sister Anna Ruysch also painted; only about a dozen pictures are attributed to her. The exhibition Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art showed at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, the Toledo Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where it closed on 7 December 2025. In 2021 the Rijksmuseum hung her in its Gallery of Honour, with Judith Leyster and Gesina ter Borch, the first women there.

Story

Rachel Ruysch signed some of her late pictures with her age, a boast few painters could make: her dated works run from the age of fifteen to eighty-three. The gap in the middle is the surprising part.

She and her husband, the painter Juriaen Pool, played the Dutch state lottery. In 1713 they won 200 guilders. In 1723 they won 75,000 guilders, a huge sum for the time, and Ruysch, by then in her late fifties, became a rich woman. Her flower pieces had long fetched more than Rembrandt's paintings, and she had painted through ten children and a contract with the Elector Palatine. After the jackpot she nearly stopped. Only two works are known from the years between 1723 and 1735.

Then she came back. Still Life of Exotic Flowers on a Marble Ledge, painted around 1735, is a crowd of plants from the far ends of Dutch trade: a white devil's trumpet, a scarlet flame lily, a prickly pear, a star-shaped carrion flower with a pale butterfly beside it. It was recognised as a masterpiece at the time and valued in 1745 at 750 guilders. It is now in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, the gift of James and Virginia Moffett.

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

Rijksmuseum (Still Life with Flowers on a Marble Tabletop) ↗National Gallery, London (Flowers in a Vase) ↗Nelson-Atkins (Still Life of Exotic Flowers on a Marble Ledge) ↗MFA Boston (Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art, 2025) ↗The Met ↗Rijksmuseum ↗National Gallery, London ↗Wikimedia Commons ↗

Prints

National Gallery, London custom prints (Flowers in a Vase, made to order) ↗eBay ↗Amazon ↗

Books

AbeBooks (Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art) ↗Bookshop.org ↗Amazon ↗

See also

Frans Hals 1582-1666Jan Steen 1626-1679Jacob van Ruisdael 1628-1682Judith Leyster 1609-1660Adriaen van Ostade 1610-1685Gerard van Honthorst 1592-1656Pieter de Hooch 1629-1683Jan van Goyen 1596-1656

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