Flowers in a glass vase on a marble table

This 1704 canvas, associated with the Johnny Van Haeften Gallery — one of London's most respected specialist dealers in Old Master paintings — represents Ruysch at a pivotal moment when her reputation had recently crossed from Dutch to international European recognition. Van Haeften's gallery has handled some of the most important Dutch and Flemish works to appear on the market in the past four decades, and a Ruysch of 1704 vintage would represent a core offering in any specialist survey of the period. The glass vase on marble table is among Ruysch's most technically ambitious settings: the transparency of the vessel required her to describe the refraction of stems through water and glass simultaneously, a challenge that pushed her observational abilities and technical resources to their limits. By 1704 she had solved these problems with characteristic confidence, making this format a demonstration piece as much as a decorative object.

A glass vase presents the most technically demanding transparent surface in Dutch still-life painting: Ruysch must describe the vase wall as both transparent and reflective simultaneously, the stems within distorted by refraction, the water surface glinting with a small elliptical highlight. She achieves this through careful reservation of light passages during the dark-ground layering process, then applying fine transparent glazes for glass thickness.