After more than three centuries, a painting by Maria van Oosterwijck is finally hanging in an Amsterdam museum.

In the 17th-century, van Oosterwijck ranked among the city’s leading painters; she counted Rachel Ruysch and Willem van Aelst as peers, and her still life works were collected by European kings and emperors. Time, shifting fashions, and gender-based oversight have obscured her reputation. Belatedly, this may be changing: on March 4, the Rijksmuseum unveiled the recently acquired Vanitas Still Life (ca. 1690), making it only the second Dutch institution, after the Hague’s Mauritshuis Museum, to boast a van Oosterwijck.

At first glance, it’s a fairly standard vanitas still life, a genre focused on the fleeting nature of life. A bouquet of roses, tulips, and irises rests on a marble table. Nearby, there’s a skull, a pair of oranges, and a leather-bound bible. Normalcy evaporates with closer inspection. The sunflower seems to rise up and leer at the skull, as though in a staring contest with death. Tablets containing the Ten Commandments are etched from right to left in pristine Hebrew. There’s a wooden instrument used by lepers to warn others of their presence.

Maria van Oosterwijck, Vanitas Still Life (1671). Photo: Rijksmuseum.

Most singular, perhaps, is the spotlit sheet of paper that hangs over the table’s edge. It’s a key, one explaining almost every element in the painting through referenced Bible verses. The skull, for instance, should be understood by Romans 5:12: “wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.”

Van Oosterwijck was deeply religious (her father and her grandfather were both church ministers) and here offers a sermon by way of painted symbols. Devout onlookers would have instinctively known the referenced messages.

Restoration work on Vanitas Still Life. Photo: Rijksmuseum/Kelly Schenk.

“Paintings by Maria van Oosterwijck are exceptionally rare because of the limited body of work that she left to posterity,” said Taco Dibbits, the Rijksmuseum’s director, in a statement. “We are delighted that, with this painting, we can offer her the place of honour that she deserves.”

It’s been some time coming. In 2021, the Rijksmuseum established a research project devoted to expanding the presence of female artists in the museum through exhibitions, an annual symposium, and acquisitions—previous purchases include work by the turn-of-the-century Dutch portraitist Thèrése Schwartze and the contemporary American artist Carrie Mae Weems.

Wallerant Vaillant, Flower Painter Maria van Oosterwijck (1671). Photo: Rijksmuseum.

Despite the fund’s hope of acquiring a van Oosterwijck, she was a slow and meticulous painter and only produced around 30 works in her lifetime. In 2023, it swooped to purchase Vanitas Still Life for €1.3 million ($1.4 million) from a German collector—small fry compared to the €175 million ($198 million) paid by the Dutch government to keep Rembrandt’s The Standard Bearer (1636) in the country. Still, the vanitas is remarkable and one of only two such Van Oosterwijck paintings. The other was purchased from her by the Habsburg emperor Leopold I and hangs in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum.

Next came months of research and restoration. Using X-ray and macro X-ray fluorescence (which helps identify the distribution of chemicals), researchers were able to trace van Oosterwijck’s changes: the flowers rearranged, an hourglass removed, a snake vanished. One conclusion? The artist worked and reworked the painting for years. Last, yellow varnish and overpainting from previous restorations was removed, returning it, the museum said, as close as possible to its original state.

Fittingly, it now hangs in the museum’s Gallery of Honor, not far from Wallerant Vaillant’s portrait of the artist.