 This lecture is entitled Rachel Royche and Dutch Baroque still life painting or sometimes a flower is just a flower. Now on the screen here, we see a portrait of Rachel Royche here in the center of the screen and she's flanked by two of her still life paintings and these are representative examples of the kinds of still life she was famous for and as you can immediately see she's famous for her flower still life paintings and they tend to be compositions like this where a bouquet of flowers fills the entire composition and maybe you'll have the inclusion of fruit or something like that as you do over here on the left. Now this image on the left dates to 1704 and the image on the right dates to let's write it up here 1716 and these dates are a little bit later than what we've been looking at so far in the Baroque. We're into the 18th century now and in that way Rachel Royche is an interesting figure because she's one of these transitional figures again. And she kind of bridges the gap between the Baroque which we've been looking at for a long time now and the Rococo which is a style associated with the 18th century that we're going to be looking at in a couple of units. Now before we move on and take a closer look at one of her paintings, I just wanted to say a few words about her and first, you know, one of the things I always point out when we look at a woman artist is of course that she is a woman artist. You need to think about that. You need to focus on that because that in itself is a remarkable thing in this day and age. So remember that she's a woman and she was extremely successful. She wasn't just you know a mediocre artist. She was very successful and in fact she was so successful that she became the court painter in Düsseldorf. So that gives you a sense of the degree of her success and it's also interesting that her father was a botanist. A lot of scholars like to talk about the fact that her father was a botanist and she certainly would have been around images of plant life growing up and a lot of people speculate that that may have had a big influence on her development as a painter. So a few things to keep in mind as we now move on and look at one of her paintings. So the image on the left here is the image we saw just a minute ago on the right. It's the painting that dates to 1716 and over here on the right, hopefully this is familiar to you. We've looked at this before and it's by Clara Peters who was a Flemish still life painter and remember she was famous for her breakfast pieces and I have this comparison on the screen for you here because I think it shows a what's so unique about Rachel Royish and her flower still lifes and also it shows the changes that have occurred in still life painting over the course of about a century. Now Clara Peters included a bouquet of flowers in her still life here, right? We see the whole left third of this painting is a beautiful and artfully arranged bouquet and it's very naturalistic with little leaves that have fallen off and it's it's very relaxed and free and naturalistic. What's interesting to me is the way a still life that is only made up of flowers, flowers that fill the whole composition really give us a kind of gravity and importance to those flowers. You know, all of our attention is focused on the flowers because that's the only thing in this painting but there's a sort of seriousness and almost grandier in this simple flower bouquet. Especially notice the way the light catches the front of these flowers and the flowers sort of emerge from the darkness. So we're seeing some of these things that we've been talking about in the Baroque that are so typical of the Baroque and that is that use of light and shade. Light and shade. We have a kind of theatricality, which is a part of that. Theatricality. We also have a really dynamic composition and you can see, you know, the the stems of the flowers create diagonals and the way the flowers fall out from the center of this bouquet creates almost this spiraling beautiful, elegant and very moving composition. And I think if you compare the flowers in Rachel Royce's painting to the flowers in Clara Peters, you see flowers that are much more animated. It's almost as though they seem to be moving in this composition, whereas Clara Peters flowers are part of a bigger composition and they're not as animated. They're not as come to life as Rachel Royce's. And again, it's important to keep in mind, as I said earlier, she's Rachel Royce is this transitional figure and now that we're into the 18th century, she's kind of foreshadowing styles that will come. And that's something you should also keep in mind with this. She's kind of foreshadowing the Rococo, as I mentioned, Rococo and we'll talk a lot more about that in the next in a couple of units. And just back to what I said at the beginning, sometimes a flower is just a flower. When I say that I don't mean just a flower in a negative way that, you know, we're just looking at a flower and there's no meaning there. Certainly there can be a lot of meaning imbued in this beautiful and simple composition of flowers, but it's not a part of something else. It's not a part of a Vanitas still life. It's not a part of a landscape. It's not a part of a prank still life. It's self contained and it speaks for itself. So Rachel Royce is yet another example of the many different faces of still life painting in the Baroque. And I think she's a wonderful example to end The Dutch Baroque with as we look forward to some some new styles as well as some new places