Rachel Ruysch: Artist, Naturalist, and Pioneer on the MFA Boston

From August 23 to December 7, 2025, the Museum of Positive Arts Boston presents the exhibition “Rachel Ruysch: Artist, Naturalist, and Pioneer”

Supply: Museum of Positive Arts (MFA), Boston · Picture: Rachel Ruysch, “Roses, tulips and other flowers in a glass vase on a marble ledge” (element)

Within the nonetheless life work of Dutch artist Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750), floral bouquets seem alive and wealthy with motion: petals and stems droop and rise and colourful lizards crawl throughout stone ledges set in opposition to darkish backgrounds. These astonishing shows, rendered with a talent that eclipsed lots of her male contemporaries, earned Ruysch fame throughout Europe in her lifetime—an period when few girls attained creative prominence.

Rachel Ruysch: Artist, Naturalist, and Pioneer is the primary complete solo exhibition devoted to the artist. It brings collectively 35 of her most interesting work from museums and personal lenders throughout the US and Europe alongside plant and bug specimens in addition to work by different feminine artists, together with Anna Ruysch, Maria Sibylla Merian, and Alida Withoos. Seeing these provocative juxtapositions, guests can achieve perception into the central function girls performed within the manufacturing of scientific information in Europe through the seventeenth and 18th centuries.

As world commerce routes expanded within the seventeenth century, hundreds of latest plant specimens arrived within the Netherlands for cultivation in greenhouses and botanical gardens. Ruysch was among the many first artists to introduce new species, from passionflowers to cacti, into her flower nonetheless lifes. Merging artwork and science, these work are removed from simply ornamental; they’re riddles, hints of a deeper understanding of the pure world. They communicate of survival and loss, the fragile stability between magnificence and violence, and the deeper narratives of colonial enlargement unfolding beneath the floor. Guests are invited to have a good time the fantastic thing about Ruysch’s work whereas discovering the hidden tales woven inside.

This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Positive Arts, Boston, the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, and the Toledo Museum of Artwork. Scientific content material was developed in collaboration with Charles Davis, professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard College.