The Forgotten Still-Life Prodigy

The 17th-century painter Rachel Ruysch was once more famous than Vermeer.

- By Zachary Fine

If still-life painting is the art of arresting decay, then it makes a lot of sense that Rachel Ruysch grew up to become one of the greatest still-life painters in the history of art. In the 17th century, Frederik Ruysch, her father, was an internationally famous embalmer. His job was to make a natural object seem permanently alive and pleasing to the eye. He could transform the corpse of a bullet-pierced admiral into the “fresh carcase of an infant,” Samuel Johnson once said. He could turn dead children into the serenest version of themselves—their faces so full of life that people wanted to kiss them, as Peter the Great once did.

The house where Rachel grew up, near the town hall in Amsterdam, had an annex for her father's skeletons, organ jars, and severed limbs, which he collected along with a growing stockpile of dead insects, amphibians, and flowers. It was a rich soil in which to live and work if you were an ambitious Enlightenment-era man of science, as Frederik was. To be a child in that environment, though, would have been incredibly weird. Imagine your father coming home day after day smelling of organ meat, his clothes speckled with blood and vague fluids. He keeps trying to show you his newest cow's heart or amputated foot, or a skink shipped in from one of the colonies. What's that under the chair? Ah, yes—a piece of lung. The barrier between life and death starts to seem thinner, more porous. Your sense of beauty dilates and shifts.

Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750) did not spend her time dissecting stray dogs or making fake fiddles out of human thigh bones, as her father did. Instead she devoted herself to the most conventionally beautiful object in nature: the flower. In fact, she became one of the top flower painters in Europe. Even though Ruysch is now a footnote in art history, she was more famous in her own lifetime than Rembrandt and Vermeer.