Still Life with Flowers

In 1937 Ernst Buchner, director of the Bavarian state painting collections, gave up at least 74 Dutch pictures from the Alte Pinakothek in Munich to trade for German art, and this flower piece was one of them. It had been in the Bavarian royal collection since at least 1805 and in the Pinakothek since the gallery opened in 1836. That same year a London dealer sold it to the collector George Lazarus.

Ruysch painted it in 1709, and the museum points to the line that holds it together, an S-curve running from the tulip at the upper right down to the marigold that droops below the marble ledge. Since 2007 it has belonged to Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, collectors in Massachusetts who have promised it to the Museum of Fine Arts. In late 2024 it went back to Munich, for the first major retrospective of Ruysch's work, which opened at the Alte Pinakothek. That museum still owns a fruit piece she painted in the same year, 1709.