Still Life with Flowers on a Marble Tabletop

By 1716, when she signed this canvas low in the corner, Rachel Ruysch was in her fifties and one of the most celebrated flower painters in Europe. The picture is small, not quite half a metre high, and she packs more than ten kinds of flowers into it. A pale iris rises at the top, a salmon-pink poppy opens at the centre, and around them crowd roses, striped carnations and the little blue trumpets of morning glory, all in a vase of dark blue glass. Insects are everywhere once you start looking, on the petals, along the stems, at the edge of the ledge. One full rose has dropped out of the bunch onto the marble tabletop, where the light catches the veined stone. The Rijksmuseum bought the painting in 1908 with help from the Vereniging Rembrandt, a society of private donors.