J. F. Roux
Roux thought that the act of artistic creation resides in the decisions that the artist makes about what to leave out from the represented world, so that a painting is the product of the artist’s considered choices about what forms and colours to emphasise. There are some early paintings at Langebaan of fishing boats and later, from a trip with Margot to Sicily, of dwellings. Roux was also commissioned on occasion to paint pictures of farm houses. But on the whole, his landscapes represent nature in all its timelessness, stripped of any trace of human intervention.
Roses, Convolvulus, Poppies, and Other Flowers in an Urn on a Stone Ledge
Ruysch has been recorded as making pendant paintings, with one painting of flowers (called a "bloemstuk") and another of fruit ("fruitstuk"), often on a forest floor. A pendant to this painting is unknown. Various attempts have been made to "read" her paintings in terms of the plants and insects shown in them, but generally they were simply treasured for their beauty and "cleverness". In this painting there are several botanically correct plants, with various insects on them.
This painting was gifted in 1986 by Wilhelmina Holladay. Its provenance doesn't go further back than an advertisement by Alan Jacobs Gallery Ltd., London, in 1984. This is typical for flower still life paintings: once they leave a collection, descriptions of them are too varied to pinpoint them exactly, and Ruysch's production was unusually high for a woman painter, mostly because she remained productive throughout her (very long) life.