Vase with Flowers, 1700 Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Rachel Ruysch also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Vase with Flowers is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

We offer free shipping as well as paid express transportation services.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

A candy-striped tulip flares at the left, its scarlet veins feathered into white by hair-thin hatches. Near the center sits an absence: the head of a spent poppy has been cut away, a dark oval of air that presses the bouquet inward and back. That intentional gap belongs to Vase with Flowers, 1700, now at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, and it is where the picture seems to breathe.
Light does not pour; it pools against an umber ground. Cerulean morning glory, a cadmium-orange marigold, and a lake-red peony gain depth through glazing, while the whites—rose, carnation, camellia-like florets—take their sparkle from pinprick touches of lead white. Above, a violet iris rises with a vertical thrust, its crinkled falls modeled by cool shadows that dissolve into the dark. On the ledge a green insect fusses among crisped leaves beside a red primula cluster, one petal edged by a single lifted bristle mark—an almost private notation.
Composition here is tight choreography. Stems arc in an S-curve to the right, checked by the iris at the upper corner and weighted by the peony below. Consider the cut poppy: the void is not merely negative space but a hinge that opens depth, a calm, surgical edit that nods to the scientific world Rachel Ruysch knew through her father, the Amsterdam botanist Frederik Ruysch. One can almost hear the papery rustle of fatigued petals and catch a sweet, faintly medicinal scent as bloom turns toward decay.
Rachel Ruysch sustained an international career that straddled the late Dutch Golden Age and the early eighteenth century. Accuracy drives her art, never pedantry. She builds translucency with thin, cool glazes over warm grounds, then snaps forms into focus with wet-over-dry accents: serrated leaf margins, pollen-dusted anthers, the minute scallop of a butterfly wing. A hairline reserve often halos those edges, keeping them luminous. Compared with Jan van Huysum’s later, airy bouquets, Ruysch prefers a darker theatre where color burns against shadow and time feels measured. The droop is deliberate. So are the bruise along a tulip’s rim and the brown stain in a leaf—small erosions that make the bouquet lived rather than arranged.
Allegory flickers without sermon. Poppies, peonies, tulips: extravagant, costly, perishable. The message is observational, almost clinical, yet tender. Perhaps that is why the empty center reads so strongly—it is both loss and structure, an absence doing compositional work.
Ruysch shows how knowledge becomes pictorial and how clarity can be sensual. Stand in front of this canvas and time slackens; the bouquet ages in silence, and the room seems to listen.