Bouquet

Look for the tulips with flames of red running through white petals. Streaked blooms like these had been the most coveted of all since the tulip craze of the 1630s, and nobody in Rachel Ruysch's day knew that the stripes were the mark of a virus, carried from bulb to bulb by aphids. That was only worked out in the 1920s.

Ruysch painted this canvas in 1706, five years after she and her husband, the portrait painter Juriaen Pool, joined the painters' guild in The Hague. It is large for a flower piece, a metre high. On the stone ledge she laid peaches at the left and dark grapes at the right, with a small snail making its way along the edge. Her name and the date are inscribed at the lower right corner of the ledge. The painting was already in the imperial gallery in Vienna by 1720, while she was still alive and working.