A groundbreaking exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston is challenging common perceptions about flower paintings through the work of Rachel Ruysch, a 17th-century Dutch master who captured both the beauty and darker aspects of nature. The show, titled "Artist, Naturalist, and Pioneer," runs through December 7 and features dozens of paintings that reveal flowers as symbols of life, death, and the violence inherent in the natural world.

Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750) was not the first woman to paint flowers, but she became by far the most successful. Born as the daughter of an anatomist-botanist, she studied under still life painter Willem van Aelst and began selling her works by age 18. Remarkably for a woman artist of her era, she continued painting throughout her marriage to fellow artist Juriaen Pool while raising 10 children, maintaining her artistic career well into her 80s.

The exhibition spans four rooms and showcases Ruysch's unique approach to floral still lifes, which were far from the dainty, prim paintings typically associated with garden clubs. Her bouquets buzz with insects and spiders, while hungry amphibians and combative lizards crawl beneath the flowers. To emphasize the scientific accuracy of her work, the installation includes natural specimens in jars and pinned in boxes, courtesy of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Ruysch's paintings demonstrate her engagement with the Dutch colonial empire's vast network of scholars and collectors. Her compositions combine blossoms from different geographic regions into single works, with the most extreme example being "Still Life with Exotic Flowers on a Marble Ledge" (1735), which features 36 different species from Europe, North America, South America, Africa, Asia, Indonesia, and Australia. Like other flower painters of her time, she also depicted blooms from different seasons together, creating impossible displays that transcended temporal boundaries.

The artist employed innovative techniques that blur the line between representation and reality. Similar to Dutch painter Otto Marseus van Schrieck, she occasionally pressed butterfly wings onto wet paint, transferring their fine scales directly to the canvas, as seen in "Still Life with Fruit and Insects." She also used actual moss samples, daubing them in paint and applying them to canvas to recreate their softly textured appearance.

Ruysch's mastery of oil paint techniques particularly shines in her rendering of flower petals. She skillfully exploited the medium's intense pigments, sheen, and potential for both translucency and opacity to capture how flower petals change appearance in different light conditions. In the Mauritshuis Museum's "Vase with Flowers" (1700), the pale outer petals of a peony contrast dramatically with its richly tinted interior, creating an almost tangible sense of depth that draws viewers in.

As her career progressed, Ruysch's compositions became increasingly dense and disorienting in their abundance. Rejecting the airier, leafier style of her teacher Van Aelst, she arranged flowers together as intricately as puzzle pieces. This approach requires viewers to stand about 18 inches away to fully appreciate the intricate details, allowing them to examine each flower's beauty like an insect sampling nectar.

In 1708, Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine in Düsseldorf, appointed Ruysch as his court painter, a position of great honor that she held largely from a distance, regularly sending completed paintings. The Elector kept her largest work for himself – a painting about four feet wide whose modern title "Still Life with Fruit and Flowers" vastly understates its complexity. This masterpiece includes a stone ledge supporting a flower basket, peaches, pomegranates, plums, grapes, hazelnuts, mulberries, corn, blackberries, three ominous melons, and countless creatures including butterflies, moths, ants, bees, beetles, spiders, caterpillars, snails, lizards, a grasshopper, a dragonfly, and a bird in its nest.

Even in her later works, painted when she was in her 80s, Ruysch maintained her precise attention to detail and deep appreciation for natural forms. In "Posy of Flowers" (1741), a dramatic pink rose dominates the composition, its water-droplet-covered petals surrounded by smaller flowers and attended by a bee. A longhorn beetle poses elegantly to the left, its striped antennae raised high, while the rose's thorn-covered stem protrudes toward viewers, daring them to grasp it.

The exhibition, curated by Anna Knaap of the MFA Boston with scientific guidance from Charles Davis of Harvard University, ultimately reveals Ruysch as an artist who understood that flowers represent far more than mere decoration. Through her scientific accuracy and artistic skill, she captured the full cycle of life – from budding and blooming to fading and death – revealing the profound connection between human existence and the natural world. Her work honors both the beauty and the darker realities of nature, showing that those who truly observe flowers are indeed "face-to-face with the very matter of life."