Rachel Ruysch (1664—1750) was one of the most successful flower painters of her time, her contemporaries praised her as ‘The Amsterdam Pallas’ and ‘Holland's art prodigy’. Rachel was a daughter of the world famous anatomist and botanist Frederik Ruysch, who let her and her sister Anna study under Willem van Aelst, a renowned flower painter from Delft. In 1693, Rachel Ruysch married colleague painter Jurriaen Pool. Besides having ten children with him, she remained very productive as a painter throughout the years (her last painting dates from 1747, when she was 83!). In 1708, Rachel and her husband received an honorable commission as court painters to the Elector Palatine Johan Wilhelm in Düsseldorf.
Rachel Ruysch's paintings originate from the typical Golden Age-tradition of flower painting, recognizable, for example, in the use of a dark background. However, her compositions are more daring and less stiff. The bouquets are much more lavish and the colors more subtle than those of her predecessors. As such, the work of Ruysch marks the transition from seventeenth to eighteenth-century art.
Rachel’s paintings are very true to nature, nevertheless a combination of fresh flowers as depicted in this painting is impossible, for the simple fact that the species do not all bloom in the same season. She made numerous drawings (as all of her colleagues did) of the separate flowers, before bringing them together in one painting. Ruysch was famous for her convincing depiction of the bouquets and the small animals she added to make the composition livelier. When looking carefully, one can discover numerous perfectly painted animals as beetles, caterpillars and butterflies in this still-life.
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