Description
Rachel RUYSCH La Haye, 1664 - Amsterdam, 1750
Vase de fleurs et épis de maïs dans une niche
Huile sur toile
Signée et datée 'Rachel Ruysch / 1742' en haut à gauche
(Ancien rentoilage fort, restaurations)
Vase of flowers and corncobs in a niche, oil on canvas, signed and dated, by R. Ruysch
h: 50,50 w: 40 cm
Provenance : Collection baron et baronne Vaxelaire, Bruxelles ;
Puis par descendance
Commentaire : Ce bouquet de fleurs de 1742 est une belle œuvre de maturité de Rachel Ruysch, l'une des plus célèbres femmes peintres et des plus importantes peintres de fleurs de l'Age d'or hollandais. Au cours d'une remarquable carrière de plus de six décennies, elle se distingua dans la peinture de natures mortes variées, de simples jetés de fleurs à des sous-bois peuplés de reptiles et d'amphibiens, et de sobres bouquets dans des vases à d'extravagants arrangements floraux agrémentés d'insectes et souvent de fruits. Ses tableaux de fleurs les plus ambitieux datent des années 1700 à 1720, pendant lesquelles elle répondit à des commandes de prospères hommes d'affaires hollandais ou de princes étrangers comme le prince d'Anhalt-Koethen (également protecteur de Jean-Sébastien Bach), l'électeur palatin et le grand-duc de Florence. De tels commanditaires désiraient de Rachel Ruysch le meilleur de ses productions, d'une grande complexité et d'un fini méticuleux, obtenu à l'aide de délicats glacis, d'une observation assidue et d'une touche appliquée avec une assurance sans pareille.
Ces dernières années, le marché de l'art a fait ressurgir un certain nombre d'œuvres de maturité de l'artiste, permettant une meilleure perception de l'évolution de son art à la fin de sa carrière, et ce tableau en est un magnifique exemple. Comme le montrent ce tableau et d'autres produits au cours de sa dernière décennie d'activité, Rachel Ruysch embrassa le goût du XVIIIe siècle alors en vogue pour une palette plus brillante. Sa production augmenta également à cette période, réalisant au moins un tableau par an malgré son âge avancé. La plupart comporte à la fois l'indication de la date et de son âge, comme pour montrer avec une fierté non dissimulée ses capacités non diminuées. Utilisant des supports de plus petit format, nécessitant moins de temps, elle peignait alors volontiers des tableaux en paires, ce qui semble être devenu l'une de ses spécialités.
Deux autres tableaux datés de 1742 - année de ses 79 ans - sont répertoriés. L'un d'eux n'est connu que par sa description dans le catalogue de la vente du cabinet de la vicomtesse de Buisseret qui eut lieu à Bruxelles le 29 avril 18911. Comme notre bouquet de fleurs, il était signé et daté en haut à gauche, peint sur toile et mesurait 49 x 40 cm. Il représentait un bouquet de fleurs variées dans un vase en verre près duquel était placé un ananas sur un entablement. Format, date, médium, description du bouquet et présence d'un motif particulier à côté du vase, ces éléments nous permettent de penser que ce bouquet aujourd'hui non localisé pouvait être le pendant du nôtre.
Nous ne connaissons pas d'autre bouquet de Rachel Ruysch au côté duquel se trouve un épi de maïs. Ces motifs, appelés bijwerk en néerlandais, mettant en valeur la composition, permettaient également de témoigner que le talent du peintre ne s'arrêtait pas aux fleurs. Jusqu'ici relégué dans ses luxuriantes compositions de fruits2, cet épi de maïs témoigne de son adoption du goût du XVIIIe siècle pour les images brillantes, claires et décoratives, comme celles proposées par le peintre de fleurs Jan van Huysum, faisant surgir ses bouquets lumineux sur des arrière-plans sombres, permettant aux fleurs, aux feuilles et aux tiges de gagner en relief, et ainsi en vraisemblance. Van Huysum et ses émules introduisirent aussi des supports sculptés et des urnes élaborés supportant leurs bouquets, les agrémentant de bijwerk de toutes sortes, notamment des fruits exotiques.
En choisissant de peindre un épi de maïs sur ce tableau, Rachel Ruysch propose une œuvre suivant les goûts de son temps, et parvient à un tour de force décoratif notamment dans le rendu des textures, comme par exemple l'aspect papier des feuilles de l'épi. Celles-ci sont à demi ouvertes et, parce ce qu'elles sont sèches, forment des courbes et des arabesques laissant apparaitre le fond. Puis, dans un effet brillant démontrant l'illusionnisme qui fit sa renommée, elle dispose la tige d'une rose de telle manière qu'elle semble tomber du bouquet devant l'épi, directement dans l'espace du spectateur.
Nous remercions le Dr. Marianne Berardi pour son aide à la rédaction de cette notice. Sa notice complète en anglais est disponible sur artcurial.com. Ce tableau sera inclus dans son catalogue et sa monographie de Rachel Ruysch actuellement en préparation.
1. Lot 96 de la vente. Le second bouquet daté de 1742 a été présenté en vente chez Christie's à New York (15 janvier 1983, n° 50), puis chez Johnny Van Haeften et Rafael Valls.
2. Des exemples sont visibles dans les collections du Palais Pitti, Florence, à Karlsruhe, à Dudmaston House, Shropshire et dans les collections bavaroises à Munich.
This floral bouquet of 1742 is a lovely late-career work by Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750), Holland's most famous Dutch woman painter, and one of the preeminent flower painters of the Dutch Golden age. Over the course of her long and distinguished career spanning over six decades, Ruysch excelled in painting several types of still lifes, ranging from quite simple sprays of flowers without any sort of container, to woodland scenes with reptiles and amphibians in the underbrush, to medium-sized bouquets in a vase, to truly magnificent large floral extravaganzas crawling with insect life, often with pendant fruit pieces to match. Ruysch's most ambitious flower paintings date roughly from 1700 to 1720. During these years she produced commissioned paintings for a host of wealthy Dutch businessmen, such as the Leiden textile merchant Allard de la Court van der Voort. She also counted among her patrons foreign nobles and aristocrats such as the Prince of Anhalt-Koethen (an early patron of Johann Sebastian Bach), the Elector Palatine of Dusseldorf and the Florentine Grand Duke, Cosimo III de Medici. The paintings such discerning collectors desired from Ruysch were the finest she produced - of tremendous compositional complexity and meticulous finish, achieved through layers of delicate glazing, keen observation, and an astonishing assurance of touch. These were understandably canvases that demanded a full year, if not two or more, to complete. Today, most of these works are in museum collections.
In recent years, a number of previously untraced late-career works by Ruysch (circa 1738-1749) have appeared on the art market, and the present painting is another wonderful example of this reemergence-enabling a much clearer picture of how the artist's work continued to evolve towards the end of her career. What this and other works from her last decade of production have demonstrated is that in her later work Ruysch began embracing the more modern 18th-century Rococo taste for a brighter palette. Interestingly, her remarkable resurgence of productivity followed directly on the heels of a period of slowed production (circa 1725-1735). While the reasons for this phase of lower productivity remain speculative, one significant factor for it was likely the enormous financial windfall she received in 1723. That year, the artist, her husband (portraitist Jurriaen Pool II) and her son Georgio won the jackpot in the Holland lottery amounting to 60,000 guilders-a considerable fortune that would have removed the necessity painting for a living.
As it turns out, from 1738 to 1748-9 (the latter being the year of her last known work), Ruysch produced at least one painting every year, excepting 1744, despite her advancing age. In both 1746 and 1747, for example, she is known to have painted pairs of companion flowerpieces (one pair in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille, and the other in the Kurpfälzischen Museum der Stadt Heidelberg which features oranges to one side of each bouquet)1. Most she signed and inscribed with both the date and her age as if to stress, with unabashed pride, that she was still going strong into the sixth decade of her career. In general, since the works from her late career are smaller in scale than her earlier paintings, she was able to paint pairs of pictures within a much shorter period of time than her large-format canvases allowed. As such they seem to have become something of a specialty late in her life.
Ruysch turned 79 in June of 1742, and at this writing we know of two other paintings by her hand dated to this year. One, a smaller and more compact bouquet than the present work, also set in a niche and placed on a marble table is on panel, and measures 25.4 x 20 cm (10 x 8 inches) [Private collection, formerly Christie's, New York, January 15, 1983 lot 50 and subsequently with Johnny Van Haeften and Rafael Valls, London]. It has a very similar palette featuring a rather light greenish background, and a cluster of flowers that are generally warm in hue (creamy white, pink, yellow and orange), with strategic bright blue accents provided by the forget-me-nots. Some of the artist's favorite floral varieties can be seen in both paintings: the white double hyacinth with pinkish centers rising up in a graceful arc from the center, a white rose and pink cabbage rose close together in the heart of the bouquet, an orange poppy anemone on the right, forget-me-nots in bright Prussian blue. Both the hyacinths and poppy anenomes were very popular 18th-century flowers.
The other recorded painting by Ruysch dated 1742 is known only through a quite detailed written description in the auction catalogue from the sale of the impressive Viscount de Buisseret Cabinet held in Brussels, Belgium, April 29, 1891, lot 96 (which sold for a very substantial 800 francs to Belgian industrialist Barbauson). It was signed just as the present work is signed, at upper left, dated 1742, was on canvas, and measured a nearly identical 49 x 40 cm. Like the present work, the bouquet was composed of a variety of flowers (roses, marigolds, tulips, peonies) in a glass vase on a marble table, beside which was placed a pineapple. The size, date, support, description of the bouquet, and the fact that there is a notable object on the ledge beside the vase, just as there is a very prominent ear of corn in the present work, creates the strong potential for this untraceable painting to have been this work's original pendant.
The present work is the only known flower painting by Rachel Ruysch which includes an ear of corn on the ledge beside the vase. Known in Dutch as bijwerk, such items placed on the table beside the vase served as "enhancements" to the composition, and also often showed the artist's skill painting something besides the flowers themselves. In the case of the corn, this was an object that Ruysch painted frequently, but in another context altogether. She routinely included ears of corn as part of the bounty of fruits and vegetables spilled onto the ground of outdoor grotto settings which she painted as pendants to her most elaborate floral bouquets. Well-known examples can be seen in the collections of the Pitti Gallery, Florence, Italy; Karlsruhe, Germany; Dudmaston House, Shropshire, England (National Trust); and the Bavarian State Picture collection, Munich, Germany.
It is interesting to speculate about what would have influenced Ruysch, at this point in her career, to place a very conspicuous ear of corn, formerly relegated to her outdoor fruit pieces, as bijwerk beside a vase of flowers. A primary reason almost certainly has to do with the prevailing Rococo trend for imagery that was brighter, blonder, and as decorative as possible. Flower painter Jan van Huysum (1682-1749), Ruysch's younger contemporary, set the model for this brighter style in Dutch flower painting which did away with the rich dark backgrounds Ruysch herself had embraced for most of her career. That inky backdrop was a convention most flower painters of the 17th-century embraced since its contrast with the illuminated bouquet enabled the flowers, leaves, and stems to stand in high relief, thereby creating the greatest effect of verisimilitude. Van Huysum and his many followers also keyed up their palettes and introduced elaborate sculptural ledges and urns for their painted bouquets, ornamenting them with bijwerk of all kinds, including mounds of exotic fruit.
In choosing to paint the ear of corn in this painting, which is otherwise all about flowers, Ruysch saw an opportunity to create a work of art that was au courant, and at the same time fashion a very decorative tour-de-force of texture and draftsmanship by showcasing the corn husk's papery sheath. In the painting, she half-stripped the cob of its husk which, because it is dry, forms a series of papery curls and arabesques in the negative space above it. Then in a brilliant touch to show off a feat of illusionism she was famous for all her life, Ruysch painted a stem of a rose so that it appears to be falling out of the bouquet in front of the ear of corn. The corn is brighter in hue and tonality than the stem of rose leaves passing in front of it, thereby creating the effect of the rose falling directly into the viewer's space.
When Ruysch created the present work, her shift to the brighter Rococo style is quite apparent. Indeed, her effort to shift to this Rococo effect probably accounts for the burst of creativity in her later years: she was trying to do something new. In the present still life one can see how the blossoms are lit more evenly with less turning into and away from the light source as they did in Ruysch's earlier bouquets which had yielded a darker effect overall. Described another way, Ruysch reduced the intensely contrasting chiaroscuro to differentiate the plants from one another in space. Instead, she relied more heavily upon chromatic contrasts to describe the flowers' relationships to one another: pink sits against white, white against yellow, yellow against pink and orange, green against blue. For the most part, the judicious color contrasts are enough to carry off the illusion, relying on tiny spots of darkness in the negative spaces only when necessary, such as between the two central roses she needed to push forward spatially to create roundness in the front of the bouquet.
The painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue and monograph of Rachel Ruysch by Dr. Marianne Berardi, currently in preparation.
Dr. Marianne Berardi
1. See M.H. Grant, 'Rachel Ruysch 1664-1750', Leigh-on-Sea 1956: Lille paintings, p. 43, nos. 197 and 198; Heidelberg paintings, p. 43, nos. 201 and 202.
Estimation 50 000 - 80 000 €
