Contributed by David Carrier / Significant twentieth-century artists occasionally depicted flowers. Andy Warhol was one, Ellsworth Kelly another. But it’s hard to think of any major painter today who focuses predominantly on them. Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750) lived in a very different world. Thanks to the bountiful worldwide empire of Golden Age Holland, even this stay-at-home painter could obtain an amazing variety of imported flowers. The Toledo Museum of Art’s “Nature into Art,” drawn from her 150 surviving works, is, improbably, the first major exhibition devoted to her. Botany thrived in Ruysch’s time due in part to Dutch imperialism. Flower painting became a major artistic genre, and she and her rivals enjoyed access to an enormous variety of exotic flowers (and insects). Critics rightfully consider her pre-eminent. “At her best,” the catalogue says, “Ruysch painted like a novelist, creating scenes within a framework at large.“ Indeed, her intricately crafted, remarkably varied paintings convey the story of Dutch capitalism.
