Two-hundred years, in 1822, the Mauritshuis museum opened its vaulted doors. It started off as the Royal Cabinet of Paintings, but the collection grew into a museum that is now home to masterpieces of the Dutch Golden Age, works like Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. To celebrate the museum’s bicentenary, this exhibition focuses on the 1600s, specifically on botanical still lifes. Before that century, floral arrangements were casually overlooked by artists, who preferred to focus on nobler themes such as portraits, landscapes, and scenes from the Bible. It was women—the amazing Maria Sibylla Merian, for instance, and the meticulous sisters Rachel and Anna Ruysch—who began focusing on botany, capturing lush arrangements and exotic blooms. This exhibition celebrates the gifted women, and men too, who made nature, science, and flowers such a compelling subject. —Elena Clavarino