Bouquet of Flowers

In 1715, when Rachel Ruysch painted this canvas, she was court painter to Johann Wilhelm, the Elector Palatine, and the picture comes from his own collection. The flower that stands out most is the white passion flower at the front, a plant from the Americas. Its name goes back to 1609, when a churchman in Rome, Giacomo Bosio, was writing a treatise on the Crucifixion and a friar born in Mexico showed him drawings of it. Bosio read its parts as the instruments of the Passion, the crown of thorns in the fringed corona, the nails in the three stigmas, the wounds in the five anthers. Before 1625 the living plant was already flowering in Rome, in a cardinal's garden. Ruysch sets it in front of a central cluster of roses, cistus and anemones caught in the light, with insects and caterpillars busy among the leaves.