Rachel Ruysch

Rachel Ruysch (The Hague 3 June 1664 – Amsterdam 12 August 1750) was a still-life painter from the Northern Netherlands who specialized in flowers. She invented her own style and achieved international fame in her lifetime, being followed by Jan van Huysum who took flower painting to another degree of popularity. Due to her long and successful career that spanned over 6 decades, she became the best documented woman painter of the Dutch Golden Age.

Rachel Ruysch was born on 3 June 1664 in The Hague to the scientist Frederik Ruysch and Maria Post, the daughter of the architect Pieter Post. Her father was a professor of anatomy and botany, and an amateur painter. He had a vast collection of animal skeletons, and mineral and botany samples which Rachel used to practice her drawing skills. At a young age she began to paint the flowers and insects of her father's collection in the popular manner of Otto Marseus van Schrieck. She knew him and his disciples from his work for the Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam, where her father did business.

Rachel would also have known and consorted with the flower painters Jan and Maria Moninckx, Alida Withoos and Johanna Helena Herolt-Graff, who all were about her age and who worked for the hortus owner Agnes Block and who, like her father, also worked with the plant collectors Jan and Caspar Commelin. In 1679, at age fifteen, Ruysch was apprenticed to Willem van Aelst, a prominent flower painter in Amsterdam. His studio in Amsterdam looked out over the studio of the flower painter Maria van Oosterwijck. Ruysch studied with van Aelst until his death in 1683. Besides painting technique he taught her how to arrange a bouquet in a vase so it would look spontaneous and less formalized. This technique produced a more realistic and three-dimensional affect in her paintings. By the time Ruysch was eighteen she was producing and selling independently signed works.

...
Wikipedia