Still-Life with Fruit and Insects

This small panel, signed and dated 1711, brings a patch of the forest floor up close. Ruysch fills it with grapes and other fruit, a bird's nest holding its eggs, and lizards and insects moving through the leaves, a whole teeming corner of nature caught at eye level. It was painted as a companion to a flower basket of the same year, and the two make a pair, one reaching up into blossom, this one crouching among the undergrowth. She worked on wood, at roughly 44 by 60 centimetres, a cabinet-sized picture meant to be studied from close range. The pleasure is in the detail, the bloom on a grape, the dew on a leaf, a lizard frozen mid-step beside the eggs.