Are you one of those who walk blithely by the floral paintings in museums with the same deep interest you devote to colonial fabric or silver plate? You won’t hurry past “Rachel Ruysch: Artist, Naturalist, and Pioneer,” a major exhibition of 35 still lifes that opens today at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Each of these paintings presents a burst of brightness against a brooding dark background, and each is mysterious. Unlike so many women artists before and since, Rachel Ruysch was not a flower “born to blush unseen,” as Thomas Gray would have it.
She lived from 1664 to 1750, the granddaughter of a prominent architect and the daughter of a botanist and anatomist who kept a famed—and macabre—cabinet of curiosities at his home in Amsterdam. (The collection was eventually bought by Peter the Great and carted off to St. Petersburg.) While assisting her father, Ruysch learned to draw, in time developing a style that combined a taste for color—at once delicate and voluptuous—with a naturalist’s tactile curiosity. She went on to claim a place among the most prominent male artists of her day, becoming the first woman accepted as a member of the Confrerie Pictura painters’ guild, in The Hague. Ruysch enjoyed renown throughout an unusually long life, her pictures sought by noble houses and selling for prices that rivaled Rembrandt’s. She married, and somehow managed to raise 10 children, but as an artist she always kept her maiden name.
