Nie tylko tulipany: Rachel Ruysch – sukces mierzony w bukietach

The last meeting in the series devoted to outstanding Dutch painters from the period known as the Golden Age of Dutch Painting. She grew up in a house full of jars with preserved parts of people, animals and plants, which her father, Frederick Ruysch, a famous Amsterdam anatomist, botanist and collector, passionately collected and preserved in concoctions of his own devising. In her adult life, as an exceptionally talented painter, she did not paint a single piece of the human figure for good reason. Initially her paintings featured cut garden flowers against a backdrop of forest floor scenery, surrounded by fragments of rotten trunks, mosses, mushrooms, lizards, frogs and insects, later she specialised in elegant bouquets, where the trained observer can trace the changing fashion for ever newer species imported from overseas colonies and the increasingly unusual breeding experiments of European gardeners.

Host: Ewa Szachowska – art therapist, coordinator and author of educational projects and a long-term associate of the Art Transfer Foundation (since 2013). She collaborates with the Museum of Modern Art on the Vistula River in the project Mature Wonderful. Conducts workshops, guided tours, lectures and various educational activities using the medium of art, dedicated mainly to adults, especially seniors, but also to people with disabilities and children. She is passionate about art history – both by education and by avocation. She deals with education through art and art therapy both from the conceptual and workshop side. She also conducts workshops and works as a guide in the Botanical Garden at the University of Warsaw.