Flowers in a Vase

When this was painted, about 1685, Rachel Ruysch was around 21. Two years earlier she had lost her teacher, the Amsterdam flower painter Willem van Aelst, with whom she had trained since the age of 15. He had taught her to arrange a bouquet so that it looks unplanned, and that ease is everywhere here. The flowers seem almost weightless, the blue columbines drifting in the dark, the honeysuckle barely touching the stone shelf. Underneath, the picture is held together by diagonals. One runs down from a columbine through the white snowball viburnum and the big pale peony to a grasshopper half hidden in the honeysuckle. Ants and caterpillars are busy among the leaves, and a crimson peony bud sits almost lost in the shadow at the edge.