Alte Pinakothek exhibits the work of the painter Rachel Ruysch | EUROtoday

Sie wusste, dass sie in ihrer Kunst die Beste war, und sie zeigte es. Auf dem Familienporträt, das sie zusammen mit ihrem Ehemann, dem Maler Juriaen Pool, um 1716 schuf, spielt der Gatte die zweite Geige – im Halbdunkel stehend, zeigt er mit der linken Hand auf eine Staffelei mit einem Blumenstillleben seiner Frau. Das Licht aber fällt auf Rachel Ruysch und den gemeinsamen Sohn Jan Willem im Bildvordergrund, das Kind der Mutter, die Mutter dem Betrachter zugewandt. Sie stützt ihren Kopf in ihre Rechte, in einer Geste selbstbewusster Künstlerschaft, und die Blumen auf dem Tisch neben ihr neigen zustimmend ihre Häupter dazu.

Rachel Ruysch battle einundfünfzig, als das Gemälde entstand, und seit acht Jahren Hofmalerin des pfälzischen Kurfürsten Johann Wilhelm, dem ihr Sohn auch seine Vornamen verdankte. Zu Ehren der Künstlerin kam der Regent, der in Düsseldorf das erste Kunstmuseum nördlich der Alpen gründete, 1711 mit seiner Gattin Anna Maria de’ Medici zur Taufe des Kindes nach Amsterdam.

Rachel Ruysch, on the other hand, only visited her patron’s Düsseldorf residence twice during her entire time as a court painter, and she by no means supplied Johann Wilhelm exclusively. She owed such privileges to her fame: half of aristocratic Europe, from the Viennese to the Florentine court, ordered flower pictures from her, and the propertied bourgeoisie of the large trading cities devoured her arrangements of flowers, butterflies and reptiles.

After his death, most of Johann Wilhelm’s picture gallery was sold to the Bavarian electors. It is therefore only logical that the Munich Alte Pinakothek is now showing Rachel Ruysch’s life’s work before the presentation moves on to Toledo and Boston. Nevertheless, an exhibition like this would have been unthinkable a generation ago. At that time, still life painters, apart from exceptional geniuses like Willem Kalf, were shown en masse and not as individuals. The genre provided the framework, not the individual achievement, and female artists played alongside as curiosities. But the wind has changed for a few years now, and now we are discovering one classical painter after another – after Judith Leyster Sofonisba Anguissola and Artemisia Gentileschi, finally the flower virtuoso Ruysch.

Fortunately, the Munich curators have resisted the temptation to make Ruysch into an icon of feminism. Their life in Europe’s only civil republic at the time, the Netherlands, offers no means of achieving this. Frederik Ruysch, the father, a well-known anatomist and director of the botanical garden in Amsterdam, apprenticed the daughter, born in 1664, to a still life master, Willem van Aelst. After his death, nineteen-year-old Rachel sets up her own business. When she married ten years later, she was already a brand.

A portrait taken shortly before the wedding shows her with a brush and palette in front of a sample book, arranging flowers and flower stems that she wants to combine in a painting. She has ten children with Juriaen Pool. In 1701 the couple was accepted into the Hague Painters’ Guild, and in 1723 the two won the Dutch lottery jackpot, 75,000 guilders, which was the equivalent of several townhouses. They retire.

Until her loss of life in 1750, Rachel Ruysch painted an image nearly yearly, the final one, an association of morning glories, daisies, buttercups, a tulip and a melon, on the age of eighty-three. She writes down her age on the backside proper subsequent to the signature. The image is as flawless as any of her work from the earlier sixty years.

Rachel Ruysch would not have a postcard-worthy masterpiece like Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”. Anyone who walks by way of the Munich exhibition will encounter fifty-seven masterful compositions of natural world, all with the identical rigor intimately and the identical beautiful stability of colours and shapes, flowers and foliage, mild and darkish areas. Sometimes the diagonal motion from backside left to prime proper, which is especially noticeable in Ruysch’s early work, is extra emphasised, typically fruits, chook’s nests and useless leaves combine into the silent symphony of flowers, however by no means as soon as does the strain that makes them ecstatic diminish cool, how nocturnal visions maintain collectively pictures rising from their deep black background.

One of the few work that also stands out from this parade of perfection is the “Still Life with Devil’s Trumpets, Peonies, Hibiscus, Passion Flowers and Other Plants” from 1700. Here Ruysch pushes the exoticism that was attribute of the ultimate part of the Dutch Golden Age , to the highest. The vegetation she has grouped across the two flowers of the Indian datura, Datura metel, within the heart of the image – together with chali lilies, Cape dandelions, an African order star, a North American climbing trumpet and a pineapple fruit – come from all corners of the already shrinking Dutch colonial empire. Ruysch was in a position to examine them in her father’s botanical backyard and within the photos of Maria Sibylla Merian, who was a technology older than her.

But the shape she provides them elevates them past the rank of mere exotica. The multi-colored cascade of rising and falling flowers, which is additional disturbed by a buzzing praying mantis on the prime and a hungry grasshopper on the backside, appears to be caught in a gust of wind that may tear it aside within the subsequent second. For simply the blink of a watch, nature stays within the order that people have given it. The symbolism that the image radiates will not be a compelled one, it arises from the perfection of the methodology of the nonetheless life itself. The abundance of flowers, made imperishable within the portray, turns into the epitome of earthly transience.

Ruysch’s flower dramas aren’t a memento mori. But loss of life is on stage on this spectacle of magnificence from the start. The lizards within the foreground of many photos owe their blue shade to not their habitat – there they’re inexperienced – however to the alcohol that preserved them. In her early days, Ruysch typically pressed the wings of the butterflies she painted immediately into the canvas; Traces of cell tissue from the victims have been preserved. Later she woke up her admiral butterflies, blue morphos and trembling dragonflies utilizing solely her brush. If you look longer, they appear to detach themselves from the floral preparations, a fragile dance between the second and eternity.

Rachel Ruysch’s photos culminate a practice that goes again over 200 years to Abraham Mignon, Verbruggen and De Heem proper as much as Jan Brueghel the Elder. No one has painted flower nonetheless lifes extra virtuosically and flawlessly, nor extra efficiently. The bourgeois artwork market shrank after 1700 parallel to the decline of Dutch naval energy, the aristocratic clientele turned their collector’s consideration to Italy and France, and the scientists, whose exploits the exhibition dedicates a separate room to, emigrated to England. At Ruysch you too can see the late bloom of an age that ended with the altering of the guard on the world’s oceans. Here you possibly can see nothing extra of the storms of historical past than the twitching of an insect’s wing. Therein lies the restrict of this artwork and its triumph.

Rachel Ruysch. Nature into Art. Alte Pinakothek Munich, till March sixteenth. Catalog 39.90 euros.