Of flowers, insects and reptiles - Dutch painters in the Golden Age

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the natural sciences and the parallel growing artistic interest in this subject caused female painters to step out of the shadow of their male colleagues and incorporate or further develop botany as well as insect and reptile studies in their art: in magnificent, deceptively real-looking flower still lifes full of exotic plants, fruits, reptiles and insects - on the other hand with botanical drawings that accurately supported scientific texts. They traveled to distant countries to discover nature for their pictures or painted and drew in botanical gardens and based on science and their laboratories. They brought life into the still life and were the first documentarians of natural history and “species diversity”, a completely unknown term at the time. They had great significance for the art world in Amsterdam, in the “Golden Age of the Netherlands” – an ambivalent term and an ambivalent time, because the success and wealth of the Netherlands is also a narrative of art, culture and colonial history.  These women significantly advanced the science of botany and zoology with their images, but still influenced art history and their works now hang in many important museums around the world.

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