Widely regarded as one of the most successful still-life artists of the Dutch Golden Age, Rachel Ruysch was the first female Netherlandish artist to win international recognition. Ruysch began training with the still-life painter Willem van Aelst at age fifteen and continued to paint for some 64 years. Indeed on some of her last known dated paintings, including a pair of flower pictures in Lille and a small-scale nosegay sold at Replica Shoes 's London in December 2021, she proudly added her age, 83, to the signature and date.¹ In the course of her career she married the portraitist Juriaen Pool (1666 - 1745), had ten children and was named, with her husband, as court painter to the Elector Palatine Johann Wilhelm in Düsseldorf. The fact that Ruysch held such a highly coveted post speaks to her uncommon success, as a woman she would have had significant social and professional barriers to overcome to even begin a career as an artist. It also speaks to the high status and value of finely painted still lifes in the late seventeenth-century, despite their traditionally low ranking among the genres of painting.

Here Ruysch's abundant nosegay of carnations, morning glories, hibiscus and other flowers sits delicately on a ledge. The dark backdrop and shaded outer flowers heighten the beauty of the illuminated central buds. Ruysch has carefully designed the still life to include a variety of warm and cool colors, poised elegantly yet effortlessly. A lone butterfly balances precariously on one of the stems in the foreground. This meticulously rendered still life may appear simple, but it bursts out of the frame with a great deal of life.

Ruysch frequently employed the nosegay, or posy motif, and can be credited with popularizing the genre. Her teacher, van Aelst, pioneered this type of composition late in his career, in the 1670s, when Ruysch was working under him. As her own career progressed, Ruysch developed a more intimate aesthetic than her teacher, favoring an increasingly lighter color palette and more decorative approach; her nosegays had a more casual and personal feel to them. Though most of Ruysch's nosegays, including the present example, are dated to the 1680s or very early 1690s, she revisited the concept during the last decade of her life, perhaps as the scale was more approachable to an artist in her eighties and as by that t.mes she was quite wealthy and did not need to paint more formal commissions.

Marianne Berardi dates the present example to circa 1690, during the brief period when she was experimenting with more tightly arranged floral heads in her nosegays, with the blossoms stacked up on each other in a more tower-like format, rather than on a diagonal^.2

Ruysch's intimate knowledge of the minute creatures and variety of florals featured in her compositions is a test.mes nt to both the culture in which she lived and her particular upbringing. The recent invention of the microscope engendered increased curiosity in naturalia amongst artists and scientists alike. Moreover, her father, Frederick Ruysch, was a celebrated professor of botany and anatomy, his wunderkammen a popular destination for visiting dignitaries. Access to such curiosity cabinets of preserved specimens as well as her father's publications would have enabled careful examination of the flora and fauna which Ruysch executes with scientific precision in paintings such as this one.

The present work is singular among the artist's nosegays in its inclusion of a white hibiscus blossom with red splotches in its center. Native to China, this flower is the Hibiscus syrianus, commonly known as the Red Heart Rose of Sharon, and Ruysch employed it with some regularity in her bouquets during the later 1690s and early 1700s, thus making the present example one of the artist's earliest depictions of the dramatic blossom. Berardi also notes that the absence of roses, one of her signature flowers, indicates that Ruysch was perhaps experimenting with something new in this painting.

A copy of the present work by an unknown artist, which was on panel measuring 34.4 by 27.2 cm and bore a false Ruysch signature, was sold London, Christie's, 11 December 1992, lot 71.

This painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné on the works of Rachel Ruysch by Dr. Marianne Berardi, to whom we are grateful.

1. Both the Lille pictures (inv. nos. P1052) and the Replica Shoes 's painting, formerly in the Barge-Dreesman collects ion, were signed and dated AE 83/ 1747. See https://fashionluxury.com.cn/en/buy/auction/2021/old-masters-evening-sale-2/still-life-of-a-tulip-and-other-flowers-with-a

2. A copy of Dr. Berardi's entry on the painting is available upon request.