The exhibition of floral still lifes by painter Rachel Ruysch, on view through December 7 at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), is billed as a rediscovery. A contemporary of the Dutch Masters, Ruysch was an international star in her lifetime, and her paintings—lush, moody, humming with exquisite detail—sometimes outsold Rembrandt’s. But after she died, her fame faded. And so, Rachel Ruysch: Artist, Naturalist, and Pioneer, which brings together 35 of her works, is the first-ever major retrospective since her death in 1750.
But the exhibit is also a genuine new discovery, because Ruysch’s paintings, it turns out, are more than simply beautiful—they are scientifically significant. “They’re vital, overlooked archives of biodiversity and botanical history,” says professor of organismic and evolutionary biology Charles Davis, one of the exhibit’s co-curators and its scientific lead. The daughter of a renowned botanist and anatomist, Ruysch grew up in Amsterdam during the Dutch colonial era, and her still lifes incorporated flowers and plants far more exotic than the tulips and roses that Europeans were used to seeing: Brazilian blue passionflowers, Mexican devil’s trumpets, South African carrion flowers, Asian glory lilies, Middle Eastern oleanders, cacti from the tropics. Her Still Life of Exotic Flowers on a Marble Ledge, painted around 1735, depicts a staggering 36 species from around the world, whose native origins line up with Dutch colonial outposts. In the exhibit, dried plant specimens from the Harvard University Herbaria, where Davis is a curator, are displayed alongside the paintings. (There are also display cases containing preserved insects and reptiles from Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology—Ruysch’s still lifes often include exotic butterflies, beetles, and lizards, all meticulously rendered.)
The far-flung plants she painted were species that Ruysch, with close ties to Dutch horticulturalists, would have been able to examine firsthand in gardens and greenhouses. The 1700s, Davis says, were a period of intense botanical exploration, and the species in Ruysch’s paintings “reflect stories of human ecology: how the plants were sourced abroad, transported to Europe, and kept alive for study.”
“An art heroine who shines as the largest orb in the heaven of art and occupies the central pearl in Holland’s crown.”
—Dutch painter Johan van Gool, 1750
All this has opened a new avenue for Davis’s research: searching within artworks for botanical and ecological data. Earlier this year, he and MFA art historians Anna Knaap and Christopher D.M. Atkins collaborated on a comprehensive inventory of 16 Ruysch artworks, identifying species using high-resolution images and tracing their geographical origins. In some cases, they found, her still lifes serve as records for when certain plants were introduced to Europe. “Art,” Davis says, “represents a vastly underexplored resource for biodiversity science.”
It’s easy to imagine that this turn in Davis’s research would have pleased Ruysch, whose artwork was partly inspired by scientific curiosity. She sometimes used real moss to apply paint. In one still life, museum conservators found butterfly scales on her painted wings, indicating that Ruysch had pressed real butterfly wings into the wet paint to achieve an accurate pattern. She lived at a time when scientific discovery relied on faithful artistic illustration—and sometimes, apparently, it still does.
