Still-Life with Flower Bouquet and Plums

In the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, this 1704 work combining a flower bouquet with plums represents Ruysch at the height of her early mature period, when her reputation was becoming firmly established across European collecting circles. The Brussels museum's collection of Dutch and Flemish still life is among the finest in Europe, and the Ruysch holds natural company alongside her predecessors and contemporaries. The combination of flowers and a specific fruit — plums rather than a mixed array — gives this composition a focused character: the blue-purple plum tones harmonise deliberately with the cooler blues and purples likely present in the flower arrangement, suggesting Ruysch thought carefully about chromatic unity. Plums were a standard Dutch still-life fruit and carried associations with autumn harvest, providing a seasonal anchor for the otherwise timeless arrangement of flowers above.

Plum surfaces require a particular technique: Ruysch would have applied a warm mid-tone base, then glazed with dark purple, and finally dusted the surface with a thin chalky glaze to simulate the natural fruit bloom. This final layer is extremely thin and easily damaged by cleaning. The cool blue-purple of the plums creates a deliberate chromatic dialogue with similarly toned flowers in the arrangement.