The archive / Baroque / Still Life with Flowers on a Marble Tabletop
Still Life with Flowers on a Marble Tabletop
Rachel Ruysch · 1664–1750
3 variations + a matched story print, every standard frame ratio. sRGB · up to 300 DPI · personal-use license.
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Sizes in the download
Print-ready files at every standard frame ratio below — the full image, nothing cropped:
The print is crisp at 300 DPI up to about A3, and stays sharp at 150 DPI from across the room, out to about 24×36″.
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The work
A bouquet that could never exist.
Roses, poppies, irises, carnations, a coil of morning glory: a spring and a summer crowded into one vase, blooming together as they never could in a garden. The Rijksmuseum counts more than ten species here, with insects tucked among the petals. Rachel Ruysch was the daughter of Frederik Ruysch, the Amsterdam anatomist, and she grew up among his cabinet of natural specimens. She studied flowers so closely she could render each with startling precision.
Look closer
Light on a dark ground.
The blossoms glow against a near-black ground, lit as if by a single source. This is the Dutch flower piece at work: each bloom observed on its own, then assembled into a bouquet no florist could have cut. Search the petals for the small lives among them. A few insects are all it takes to turn an arrangement into a study of growth and decay.
Why it matters
The most celebrated flower painter of her age.
In 1701 Ruysch became the first woman admitted to Confrerie Pictura, the painters' confraternity in The Hague. By 1708 she was court painter to Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine, sending him a picture a year. She kept working into her eighties. In her lifetime her paintings often sold for more than Rembrandt's.
In her lifetime her paintings often sold for more than Rembrandt's.— after the National Gallery, London
The file & the facts
- Title
- Still Life with Flowers on a Marble Tabletop
- Artist
- Rachel Ruysch
- Year
- 1716
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Original
- 48.5 × 39.5 cm
- Collection
- Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
- Rights
- Public-domain painting · open access · Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam — Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt, SK-A-2338 (CC0, courtesy)
- File
- sRGB · JPEG · 150–300 DPI
