Bouquet of Flowers, pressed and painted

You are Rachel Ruysch, born in The Hague in 1664. Your father, Frederik Ruysch, is an anatomist and botanist; your mother, Maria Post, comes from a family of painters and architects. In 1666 the family moves to Amsterdam.

At about fifteen your parents pay for an apprenticeship with Willem van Aelst, the best-known still-life painter in the city. You stay about three years, until his death in 1683. From him you take a way of building a bouquet: not symmetrical, but swept on a diagonal from lower left to upper right, with flowers turning in and out of the light.

In 1693 you marry the portrait painter Juriaen Pool; you will have ten children. In 1701 the two of you join Pictura, the painters' confraternity in The Hague. You are its first woman member. Women cannot join the painters' guild in Amsterdam.

Your father lectures to the surgeons' guild, trains the city's midwives and, from 1685, directs Amsterdam's botanical garden. He is famous across Europe for his preparations: bodies and organs injected with tallow, wax and cinnabar so that they look alive, kept in jars of spirits. He opens his collection to visitors as a museum; in 1717 he sells it to Peter the Great.

Flowers, insects and reptiles were part of the household. Flower pieces of this period often gather in one bouquet plants that do not bloom at the same time: a convention of the genre, not a record of one vase.

From Otto Marseus van Schrieck, who had worked with Van Aelst in Italy and died in Amsterdam in 1678, you take more than motifs. He pressed real butterfly wings into his paintings, and so, sometimes, will you. The Munich exhibition suggests you may even have used specimens your father bought from his estate; it says no more than that.

By now your paintings are ordered up to a year ahead. When the traveller Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach visits in 1711, he finds two finished pieces only because they are waiting for their buyer, Pieter de la Court in Leiden, who has paid 1,500 guilders for the pair. Your brushwork is so fine, the Munich exhibition reports, that by your own account you finish only three or four paintings a year.

In 1708 Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine, makes you his court painter, with a yearly salary and gifts in exchange for one painting a year. You do not have to live at his court in Düsseldorf; you stay in Amsterdam. Later he and his wife, Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici, stand godparents to your youngest son and come to Amsterdam for the baptism.

A dark ground

Like many flower painters of your generation you set the bouquet against near-black; you will lighten your backgrounds only after 1735.

A diagonal

Tulips and a poppy at the top right, the guelder rose low at the left, the wheat falling over the ledge: Van Aelst's sweep, made fuller.

A ledge

A brown stone ledge with an orange, a snail and a grasshopper, so the eye has somewhere to stop.

One real insect

A Red Admiral by the wheat, at the viewer's eye level, made from a real butterfly's wings.

Paint the rough shape of the butterfly in lead white and leave it wet. Take a real wing, from a dead butterfly, and press it into the paint; then lift it away. The coloured scales stay stuck in the white, and with them the pattern of the wing, down to the fine veins and hairs.

Not every scale will take, and the body, head and antennae cannot be printed. Paint those in with the brush, and fill gaps in the pattern. Varnish and oil also make some scales go clear, which is another reason for touching in.

Here you chose a Red Admiral, a native butterfly, and set it on a stalk of wheat at the bottom of the picture, at the viewer's eye level. Under the microscope the whole wing proves to be covered in scales. You can see the strongly patterned underside of one wing, with its typical half-ring markings, and part of the upper side of another: you printed two wings one over the other. You seem to have added only a little paint to the pattern. Over the scales of the wing tips you glazed a deep black and a bright vermilion.

AI-generatedStage 6: the outline in wet lead white.

Today: the printed wings.

The print was found in 2024, during the research for the exhibition, and the Munich conservators call it nearly perfectly preserved. That is rare. Butterfly scales are fragile, and most prints in old paintings survive only in fragments, worn by light and by rough cleaning. In your Flower Piece of about 1682 the restorers took off the yellowed varnish under a stereomicroscope so as not to lose the remaining scales.

The painting entered the Bavarian collections in 1806 from the gallery in Düsseldorf, Johann Wilhelm's picture gallery, one of the finest in Europe. Some of the paintings you made for him appear in the drawn wall views of the Düsseldorf and Mannheim galleries; whether this one does has not been checked for this guide. Today it belongs to the Bavarian State Painting Collections and hangs in the Staatsgalerie in the Neues Schloss at Bayreuth.

For the exhibition Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art, shown at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, then at the Toledo Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2024–25, conservators looked closely at your Munich paintings, and the butterfly print on this one was found. A fuller account of their technical findings has not yet been published.

The image this guide is built on is a scan of a printed reproduction from 2007, before that examination. Its colours are warmer and its darks flatter than the painting's.