Rachel Ruysch, 'Flowers in a Glass Vase with a Tulip', 1716

Rachel Ruysch is often considered supreme among the great Dutch flower painters of her time. She never failed to bring something new and beguiling to her magnificent bouquets. Here, she has painted a profusion of roses, honeysuckle, pear blossom and other flowers, culminating in the rare Semper Augustus striped tulip, the most treasured of them all and now extinct.

What feels fresh in this painting is a subtle shift in style. Ruysch has kept the dark background typical of seventeenth-century Baroque painting, unlike Jan van Huysum’s Glass Vase with Flowers, with a Poppy and a Finch Nest, which uses a lighter backdrop. Yet her touch is even more delicate here, adding a hint of rococo charm and playfulness. The focus is no longer on the precise, scientific depiction of each flower, as it had been in the previous century. Instead, the rose petals resemble fine frills and the tulip leaves curl in graceful lines. The honeysuckle florets look like tiny, sculpted ornaments. Together, they move the painting towards the decorative style just beginning to spread across Europe. Ruysch signed and dated the work in an elegant script that matches its refined feel.

Ruysch did not entirely forget her considerable knowledge of science. Insects abound in the painting. Hidden here and there are winged creatures, flies of many kinds, beetles and a damsel fly. A hump-backed beetle toddles away along the ledge, outlined against a glow of soft blue. An inquisitive caterpillar, handsomely striped in jewel colours, undulates up to reach the flowers. A high window is reflected in the glass vase and drops of water sparkle on leaves.

For many years, people believed that Dutch flower painters worked gradually, adding each bloom as it came into season. However, this idea has since been reconsidered. Rather, artists kept a collection of flower studies and used them to fill in a preplanned composition. Ruysch began by sketching the shapes of the flowers and leaves onto the prepared surface, probably in a dark paint such as bone black. She then painted the background, carefully following the outlines but leaving the flowers and leaves unfilled. These were added afterwards, built up over a number of layers, usually working from dark tones to lighter ones. The final step was to apply the delicate highlights that give the painting its brilliance.

Ruysch painted this exquisite arrangement in 1716, her final year as Court Painter to the Elector Palatine, Johan Willem II, in Düsseldorf. She had had ten children by then and was allowed to stay in Amsterdam, provided that she sent him one painting a year until his death. He and other clients paid her handsomely. At the age of 59, she also won a large amount in a lottery, becoming a wealthy woman in her own right. But it was not all success and glory for this extraordinary artist. Many of her children had died young, so she knew bereavement and grief – yet these were never allowed to spill into her pictures. As a testament to the paintings’ worth, she left one to each of her daughters as a dowry when she died.