With public art collections closed we are bringing the art to you, exploring highlights from across the country in partnership with Art UK. Today’s pick: Dudmaston’s Still Life With Fruit, Bird’s Nest and Insects by Rachel Ruysch
A luscious arrangement of late-season fruit is amassed at the base of a young oak tree. Clusters of grapes nestle between plump peaches, unhusked corn and a single, rotund gourd. Encroaching on this display is a rich woodland understorey: fungi, thistle, white dead-nettle, forget-me-not and thorny sprays of bramble. Brilliant flashes of red and orange in the form of physalis seed heads, rowan berries and corn kernels enliven this shaded spot. A chipped stone plinth is a singular vestige of what may have once been a formal garden. The scene teems with snails and insects – creatures whose short lifespans embody transience and impermanence, the hallmarks of a vanitas. So too do the ripening fruits, some on the cusp of over-maturing and rotting. White mould blooms on a grape; the dewy flesh of a peach has split. In the lower right corner, a miniature drama unfolds: a lizard feasts on a speckled egg in a bird’s nest.
Still Life With Fruit, Bird’s Nest and Insects is a masterful study of earthly abundance and forces of decay, the promise of life and the certainty of death. It is the work of Rachel Ruysch (1664-1740), one of the most admired flower painters of the Dutch golden age and perhaps the most successful Dutch female artist in history. In a period where few women painted professionally, Ruysch led a lucrative career that spanned almost seven decades, saw her become the first female member of the Confrerie Pictura in The Hague and named court painter to the Elector Palatine in Düsseldorf – all while raising 10 children.
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