A 'Forest Floor' Still Life of Flowers

Ruysch's Forest Floor Still Life of Flowers from around 1720 belongs to her distinctive subgenre of outdoor or 'forest floor' arrangements, in which flowers, fruit, birds' nests, insects, and small animals are depicted in a naturalistic outdoor setting rather than a vase or interior composition. This type, which Ruysch developed alongside her more conventional vase arrangements, had roots in the work of Otto Marseus van Schrieck and allowed Ruysch to incorporate a wider range of natural history subjects — mosses, fungi, lizards, snails — into her compositions. By 1720, Ruysch was in her sixties and remained at the height of her technical powers.

The forest floor setting provides Ruysch with a complex natural environment of decomposing leaves, soil, moss, and roots against which to arrange the flowers. Her rendering of the varied textures — velvet petals, slick snail shells, rough bark — demonstrates the extraordinary range of her painterly touch.