Many of us are familiar with titans of the Dutch Golden Age such as Frans Hals, Johannes Vermeer, Rembrandt, Jan Steen and more. Yet fewer have heard of it Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750), known during her life for her original style, but not enough in the canon of Western art history in the centuries.
Co -organized by the Toledo Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, the first major American exhibition of the artist’s work, Rachel Ruysch: Nature in ArtIntroduces the audience in the width of its remarkable paintings.
During her seven decades career, Ruysch was admitted to the Confrerie Pictura, the Hague Painters’ Society, and she was appointed judicial painter in Düsseldorf to Johann Wilhelm, voter Palatine. She got up to be one of the best paid artists of her day. In a preface for the exhibition catalog, the directors explain that “Ruysch gained fame in Europe in her life, but her oeuvre was not studied by art historians in the following centuries. She has never been the subject of a large exhibition – so far. ‘
Art historians consider Ruysch to be one of the most talented Still Life artists of the era, and by the time she died at the age of 86, she had produced hundreds of paintings. Nature in art Contains more than 90 international loans, including 48 of its most important works.
The artist was born in The Hague, the Netherlands, from parents with backgrounds in science and design. Her father was a professor of botany and anatomy and her mother was the daughter of an architect. The artist started painting when she was around 15, and copied flower and insect specimens from her father’s collection.
As her artistic faculty grew, Ruysch taught her father and her sister Anna how to paint. They merged modern scientific observation with an incredible predisposition to capturing light, composition and form, and she usually went out with her paintings when they signed them, giving art historians a clear report of stylistic shifts and subject in the course of time.
Ruysch’s success during her life is attributed to both her unmistakable talent and the 17th-century Dutch sense of flowers and gardening. Still paintings of flower arrangements and tables that hang with food emphasized the beauty of nature and the gifts of abundance. The Vanitas genre also came from De Stijl, interpret Memento MoriLatin for “remember that you should die” in subtle, well -conscious visual signals.
Motives such as skulls, insects, rotting fruit or wilting flowers were symbolic memories of the uselessness of pleasure, strength or wealth after death. For example, in Ruysch’s ‘Posy of Flowers, with a beetle, on a stone richel’, beetles and flying crawl over a spray of peonies and wild flowers that will soon wilt, and water droplets mean purity and the volatility of life.
Nature in art Runs from 12 April to 17 July in Toledo and then travels to Boston, where it will open on August 23.
