The velvet petals of peonies, lilies, tulips and passionflower bloom so realistically in Dutch painter Rachel Ruysch's still lifes that it looks like you could ruffle them with your fingers.
Ruysch was one of the most well-known and well-paid artists of the late 1600s and early 1700s. Born in The Hague, Netherlands, Ruysch began producing her first major works-often of floral arrangements against a dark background-at age 16 or 17, in 1681.
But also crawling through most of her paintings, depicted so realistically that scientists can identify them today, are moths, butterflies, bees, ants, lizards and many other species of things that creep and crawl.
Ruysch's work is now on display at the Toledo Museum of Art, in an exhibition called "Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art." It's the first major exhibition of her work, says Robert Schindler, the museum's William Hutton Curator of European Art.
It's also the first to pair her paintings with actual specimens of the flora and fauna that she integrated into her work. Working with researchers from the University of Michigan Herbarium and Museum of Zoology, Schindler identified dozens of specimens to display along with about 50 of her best paintings. These are shown alongside illustrated books and botanical and zoological drawings, created over her six decade career.
In conceiving the exhibition, Schindler wanted to contextualize Ruysch's paintings by showcasing specimens of the insects, amphibians and plants depicted in Ruysch's work. These specimens would be nested within the exhibition itself.
"There's a lot of ground to cover, and she was really prolific," Schindler said. "Her work is stunning, but she was highly specialized. How do you break it up and add to the visitor experience?"
Visitors to the Toledo Museum wind through a corridor in the exhibition hall, working their way through Ruysch's early work. They see a painting done by Ruysch that is nearly an exact replica of an older contemporary. They see an example of a fellow female painter. They view a huge canvas of a forest scene by yet another contemporary artist, featuring a stump brimming with plants and animals, which Ruysch copied several times.
But then, visitors turn another corner, and tucked within the middle of the exhibition is a museum of natural history, in miniature. The specimens held within this miniature museum of natural history, says Brad Ruhfel, research collection manager for vascular plants at the U-M Herbarium, are ones rarely seen by the general public. In total, the Toledo Museum of Art borrowed 79 insect specimens, five amphibian and reptile specimens, and 10 plant specimens from U-M.
Within glass display cases are praying mantis, rows of beetles, red admiral butterflies and old world swallowtails. Along the walls are pressed plants-blue passionflower, trumpet-creeper, datura. Some of the specimens-the passionflower, for instance-are displayed exactly alongside the paintings and drawings that represent them.
The art of identifying specimens
With many of the species in Ruysch's paintings already identified, Schindler reached out to U-M. He connected with Ruhfel, who worked with Schindler to select the best plant specimens to display in the exhibition.
"What made me excited about this exhibit was that it combined several things that interest me: I'm from Toledo, so I grew up going to the Toledo Museum of Art for school field trips and family outings," Ruhfel said. "Combining my botanical and natural history interests with art and my hometown museum was great, and it's a really good opportunity to show off our collections in a way that isn't done too often."
Ruhfel was able to pull plant specimens for three of the Ruysch paintings in the exhibition. He gathered armfuls of specimens from the Herbarium collections, and he and Schindler combed through the samples to find specimens that were both visually striking and had a compelling story.
One of the specimens Ruhfel pulled, called datura, or angel's trumpet, is mentioned in ancient religious texts. Worshipers used the hallucinogenic plant in ceremonies and rituals. Another plant, the exotic-looking passionflower, has a halo of coronal filaments frilling out from the base of its petals. The passionflower produces passionfruit, which are eaten or used in juices.
"There are a lot of people who go to art museums, but maybe they never go to a natural history museum, so having all of those specimens in the same place is really cool," Ruhfel said. "It might be the first time that the Toledo museum had biological collections like that alongside paintings."
Dutch colonialism and the inseparable relationship between art and science
During the late 1680s and through the 1690s, Ruysch began incorporating many plant and animal species not native to the Netherlands into her work, Schindler says. She was painting during the Scientific Revolution, a period from the 1500s to the 1700s that marked the emergence of modern science. Interest in biology and botany was high, and people in Europe began seeing specimens of plants and animals that would have been wholly exotic to them.
The daughter of Frederik Ruysch, a renowned anatomy and botany professor in Amsterdam, Rachel had access to a dazzling variety of plant and animal specimens, many of which would have been introduced to the Netherlands through Dutch colonialism.
"The backdrop to her work really is the colonial context, which we tried to address at least a little bit, because without exploration, exploitation and colonization abroad, these species would not have come to Europe," Schindler said.
Megan Reddicks Pignataro, curatorial research associate of European art at the Toledo Museum of Art, says the exhibition also aims to show the ways disciplines of art and science melded together during this time.
"On the one hand, there is a desire to capture knowledge in Amsterdam at this moment," she said. "Part of this art, science and nature section, too, is to dispel the notion that art and science were actually separate disciplines. When you're encountering a new species for the very first time, how do you record that-in 1700?"
This blending of art and science is something Ruhfel hopes will continue. Museum collections are valuable for ecologists and biologists-but experts in other disciplines may find them useful as well. And these are specimens that the public rarely has the opportunity to see.
"It's really just a good opportunity for us-it's an example of how you can use our collections here for things outside of the normal scope of ecology and evolutionary biology research," Ruhfel said. "Our specimens can be quite useful for artists, art museums and historians. There's a lot that people can use here that isn't just biology."
"Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art," will run at the Toledo Museum of Art through July 27.
