Rachel Ruysch’s magnificent, deceptively realistic floral still lifes with exotic plants and fruit, butterflies and insects already became sought-after and expensive collector’s items during her lifetime. Demand was so great that the Amsterdam painter could afford to produce merely a few works a year. As the daughter of the renowned professor of anatomy and botany, Frederik Ruysch, the first female member of the Confrerie Pictura, court painter in Düsseldorf, lottery game winner and the mother of eleven children, she was an exceptional figure in her time. From November 2024 on the Alte Pinakothek will present the world’s first major monographic exhibition of her work. Discover the world of Rachel Ruysch between art and science, perfected fine painting and artistic freedom amidst illustrious patrons in Amsterdam, Düsseldorf and Florence.
Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750), Flower bouquet, 1715
© Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich
First major retrospective
With a selection of over 50 works from all Ruysch’s creative phases, the exhibition provides the first overview of her career of some 70 years. Around 80 paintings from national and international collections from fourteen countries, including 57 paintings by Rachel Ruysch herself, some 41 works on paper, almost 600 zoological and botanical specimens and historical optical instruments will be on view in the Alte Pinakothek. The exhibition showcases the variety of her pictorial themes, reunites pairs of paintings that have been separated, and clearly demonstrates the outstanding quality of the artist’s work within the context of her contemporaries.
Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750) and Michiel van Musscher (1645-1705), Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750), 1692, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Adele Veronica Satkus Bequest, Walter and Leonore Annenberg Acquisitions Endowment Fund, Lila Acheson Wallace, Women and the Critical Eye, Charles and Jessie Price, and Henry and Lucy Moses Fund Inc. Gifts, Victor Wilbour Memorial Fund, Hester Diamond Gift, and funds from various donors, 2023
Art, nature and science
The artistic and intellectual environment in which Rachel Ruysch lived and worked is one of the focal points of the exhibition. In particular, correlations between her œuvre and the great scientific questions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are traced, as her father, Frederik Ruysch’s famous collection of scientific specimens was most likely a major source of inspiration for her artistic work. The exhibition therefore sheds new light on the relationship between art, nature and science at a time of scientific discovery and on the role of women in the study of the natural world.
Ruysch’s relationship with other renowned still life painters and the tradition of floral painting on which her work is based, are also explored. Juxtapositions with paintings by her teacher Willem van Aelst, her contemporaries Jan Davidsz. de Heem, Otto Marseus van Schrieck and Abraham Mignon, as well as other talented artists such as her sister Anna Ruysch, Maria van Oosterwijck and Alida Withoos, highlight her influences, her love of experimentation, and her innovative approach.
Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750), Fruit Still Life with Stag Beetle and Nest, 1717, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe
© Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe
Toledo and Boston
This exhibition is organized in cooperation with the Toledo Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where the exhibition will take place in the following periods:
Toledo, Toledo Museum of Art: 13 April – 27 July 2025
Boston, Museum of Fine Arts: 23 August – 7 December 2025