A forest floor still life with a bird's nest, toadstools, snails, boysenberries, aurora, and common blue butterflies

The reverse of this painting bears an unidentified collector’s label, ascribing it to the Dutch still-life painter Rachel Ruysch. The attribution to Ruysch was dismissed by Fred G. Meijer when the work first appeared at auction in 1999 (see Provenance). Elias van den Broeck and Rachel Ruysch’s sotto bosco (‘forest floor’) still lifes have been confused on a number of occasions, as exemplified by another work by van den Broeck, now in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, to which Ruysch’s signature was added at a later date (fig. 1). Van den Broeck’s still lifes are known for their realism. Along with his contemporaries Otto Marseus van Schriek, Jeremias Falch and Philip van Kouwenbergh, van den Broeck went as far as attaching real butterfly wings to a white painted ground in order to best capture their beauty. In many cases, as in the present panel, the wings were subsequently lost and likely restored by another hand (see F. Meijer, 'Philip van Kouwenbergh', Oud Holland, LII, 1980, p. 320).