Spring Ahead! Rachel Ruysch

Rachel Ruysch - Still-Life of Flowers - 1695 - Oil on canvas, 32 x 26 cm - Private collection (click photo for larger image)Dutch Baroque era painter Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750) was successful for nearly 70 years as a specialist in flower paintings. Ruysch’s maternal grandfather, Pieter Post, was an important architect, and her father, Frederik Ruysch, an eminent scientist. From him, she learned how to observe and record nature with great accuracy. At 15, she was apprenticed to the well-known Dutch flower painter Willem van Aelst. From that point on, she produced various kinds of still lifes, mainly flower pieces and woodland scenes.

The work featured here shows a still-life of flowers with a nosegay of roses, marigolds, larkspur, a bumblebee and other insects. The artist's father was a celebrated professor of botany and anatomy, his cabinet of curiosities (“wunderkammern”) a popular destination for visiting dignitaries. Access to such collections of preserved specimens would have enabled careful examination of insects and moths, which Rachel Ruysch executes with scientific precision in paintings such as this one.

Van Dyck: Formality and Casualness in Perfect Harmony

Sir Anthony van Dyck - Entry of Christ into Jerusalem - c. 1617 - Oil on canvas, 151 x 229 cm - Museum of Art, Indianapolis (click photo for larger image)Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) was a Flemish Baroque painter who was one of the most important and prolific portraitists of the 17th century. He is also considered to be one of the most brilliant colorists in the history of art. He set a new style for Flemish art and founded the English school of painting; the portraitists Sir Joshua Reynold and Thomas Gainsborough (both discussed elsewhere on What About Art?) of that school were his artistic heirs.

The work featured here is a youthful painting of the artist, created when he was a member of Peter Paul Rubens's workshop. (Rubens is discussed elsewhere on What About Art?) The picture was executed in the style of Rubens.

The subject matter is the first episode in what is known in Christianity as Passion Week (or Holy Week). It begins with Palm Sunday, when Christ entered Jerusalem. Over the course of the following week, he would be arrested, tortured and crucified—and then rise again from the dead on Easter Sunday.

Francesco Albani: The Annunciation

Francesco Albani - The Annunciation - n.d. - Oil on copper - 62 x 47 cm. - The Hermitage, St. Petersburg (click photo for larger image)Francesco Albani (1578-1660) was an Italian Baroque painter who was active in Bologna, Rome, Viterbo, Mantova, and Florence. He studied in Bologna with the Mannerist painter Denijs Calvaert before joining the Carracci Academy. While at the academy, he was an enthusiastic pupil. Like so many other artists from Bologna, he moved to Rome to study classical art, which he then applied with zeal to his own work. Albani's classicism can be seen in the altarpieces he painted after returning to Bologna, and in the cycles he painted on mythological subjects. 

Albani almost single-handedly created an appetite for light-hearted, pleasant works that lasted throughout the seventeenth century.

Albani painted many versions of the Annunciation, one of which is featured here.

Paulus Potter: An Idealized Vision

Paulus Potter - Figures with Horses by a Stable - 1647 - Oil on panel, 45 x 38 cm - Museum of Art, Philadelphia (click photo for larger image)Dutch Painter Paulus Potter (1625-1654) was part of a family of painters, draughtsmen and etchers. He is celebrated chiefly for his paintings of animals, which appear prominently in all of Potter's works. He sometimes featured them singly, but more often painted them in small groups silhouetted against the sky, or in greater numbers with peasant figures and rustic buildings in an extensive landscape.

Potter entered the Guild of St. Luke at Delft in 1646. In 1649 he moved to The Hague, where in the following year he married Adriana, daughter of the architect Claes van Balkeneynde. In 1652 Potter settled in Amsterdam. He probably received his early training from his father, the painter Pieter Potter, but his style shows little dependence upon that of earlier masters. In so short a career there was little development in style between the earlier and the later works, but 1647 seems to mark a peak in his achievement, for many of the finest paintings bear that date.

In the work featured here, a man attempts to mount his horse with the assistance of another man, in the shaded yard in front of a stable. The woman standing next to them has momentarily turned her attention away from the infant she is nursing in order to watch the scene. Despite his close observation of nature, Potter offers not a truthful image of life in the country but an idealized vision that would have appealed to the fantasies of the artist's urban clientele.

Frans Hals: The Master of Instantaneous Emotion

Frans Hals - Malle Babbe - 1633-35 - Oil on canvas, 75 x 64 cm - Staatliche Museen, Berlin (click photo for larger image)Baroque painter Frans Hals (1580-1666) was the great 17th-century portraitist of the Dutch bourgeoisie of Haarlem, where he spent nearly his entire life. Hals evolved a technique that was close to Impressionism in its looseness, and he painted with increasing freedom as he grew older. He was most definitely an artist ahead of his time.

The name Malle Babbe van Haarlem—which can be translated as Silly Betty or Mad Meg of Haarlem—is inscribed on an old piece of stretcher left in the modern one supporting this canvas. In 1653, the Haarlem burgomasters allowed the local "Workhouse" (which was both a house of correction and a charitable institution) 65 guilders to care for Malle Babbe. The document also refers to Frans Hals mentally impaired son, Pieter, who had been confined in the same place since 1642. Thus a real person served as the model for Hals's painting in Berlin and for a number of related works. The owl was also a common symbol of folly in the Netherlands, rather than wisdom.

This painting shows Hals’ supreme mastery of the rendering of instantaneous emotion and movement. Hals is unsurpassed in this regard. He selected moments when human nature reveals all its vital energy. Most often, his shows the instant when the joy of life is at its absolute highest.