Page:Women in the Fine Arts From the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentiet.djvu/85

24 to her astonishment, that the Minerva Academy consid- ered the picture as belonging to them.

However, this affair brought the name of the artist to the knowledge of the public, and she determined to devote herself to the painting of flowers and fruit, in which she has won unusual fame. There is no sameness in her pictures, and her subjects do not appear to be "arranged"—everything seems to have fallen into its place by chance and to be entirely natural.

Gerardina Jacoba and her brother Julius van de Sande Bakhuyzen, the landscape painter, share one studio. She paints with rapidity, as one must in order to picture the freshness of fast-fading flowers.

Johan Gram writes of her: "If she paints a basket of peaches or plums, they look as if just picked by the gardener and placed upon the table, without any thought of studied effect; some leaves covering the fruit, others falling out of the basket in the most natural way. If she paints the branch of a rose-tree, it seems to spring from the ground with its flowers in all their luxurious wantonness, and one can almost imagine one's self inhaling their delightful perfume. This talented artist knows so well how to depict with her brush the transparency and softness of the tender, ethereal rose, that one may seek in vain among a crowd of artists for her equal. . . . The paintings are all bright and sunny, and we are filled with enthusiasm when gazing at her powerful works."

This artist was born in 1826 and died in 1895. She lived and died in her family residence. In 1850, at Groningen, she took for her motto, "Be true to nature and you