Fashion Inspired by Art: Rachel Ruysch’s “Still Life of Flowers, 1710”
I know what you’re thinking: Florals? For summer? Groundbreaking. But think about how striking a floaty floral dress looks with a leather jacket or vest, or how cool a girl looks pairing a flowery shirt with combat boots. (I’m looking at you, Miley…)
This Fashion Inspired by Art post – based on “Still Life of Flowers, 1710” by Rachel Ruysch – will show you how to create edgy, summer-appropriate looks with a feminine twist, using accessories inspired by bugs, bones, butterflies, and other aspects of the natural world.
Rachel Ruysch is not your average flower painter. I’ve seen one of Ruysch’s paintings at the Detroit Institute of Arts; it was breathtaking. Not only was each flower was painstakingly detailed and richly colored, but for every beautiful bloom there was a flower with a broken stem, or a delicate-winged moth, or the dark, shiny shell of a beetle.
Ruysch’s compositions are all about contrast and truth: the natural state of flowers, some decaying, some broken, some covered in bugs, but still beautiful and captivating.
Rachel Ruysch’s “Still Life of Flowers, 1710” (1710) via Wikimedia Commons (Click image to enlarge.)
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About Rachel Ruysch
Born in 1664 in the Netherlands, Ruysch was one of the first female Dutch artists to achieve international recognition, and is still known today as one of the masters of flower painting from the Dutch Golden Age. Her father, a professor of botany and anatomy at the University of Amsterdam, fostered Ruysch’s interest in insects and exotic flowers by allowing her to assist in the preparation and display of his specimens when she was young.
In a time when women were rarely allowed to learn painting unless they were taught by male family members, Ruysch was apprenticed to the still-life artist Willem Van Aelst in 1679. Ruysch’s dynamic compositions of exotic flowers in bright colors, combined with fauna like beetles, bees, snakes, salamanders, and other creepy-crawlies, as well as flowers with broken stems or blooms in various states of decay, quickly earned her a reputation as a talented artist.
