Painters have slipped butterflies into their pictures for four centuries, as a sign of the soul, as proof of a fine brush or as a private joke. In these twelve paintings the insect changes the story: a god paints butterflies, a moth carries the wrong name, and a butterfly visits a flower that smells of rotting meat.
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How We Chose These 12 Paintings
The appeal of the butterfly starts with what the insect offered a painter. It is small enough to sit on a petal or at the edge of a scene. Its wings are symmetrical and patterned, so they show off a fine brush. And it brings a touch of bright color, along with the idea of flight, into a picture where nothing else moves.
The insect also carried a meaning. A crawling caterpillar turns into a winged adult, and that change made the butterfly, in Christian art, an image of the soul rising after death. Set beside cut flowers in a still life, it recalled how quickly beauty and life run out.
Because butterflies turn up in thousands of paintings, the insect alone was never enough to earn a place here. A picture got in when the butterfly or moth changes how the scene reads, when a museum catalogue or the artist's own letters document its story, or when the painting counts among its maker's best known works.
Half of the twelve, as it turned out, belong to a single tradition. Six come from the flower and insect pictures painted in the Netherlands and Flanders between 1614 and 1737, where a butterfly was studied as closely as a tulip. The other six show what later painters did with the same insect, some keeping the old symbols, others dropping them.
12. Sprig of White Currants with Insects, Jan van Kessel the Elder (c. 1653 to 1661)
At the right edge of Sprig of White Currants with Insects, a female wall brown butterfly sits with its wings closed. It is painted at life size, with powdered gold and fine lines scratched into the paint with a sharp point, a technique called sgraffito. Eleven other insects surround the currants against a pale gray ground, each one set apart from the rest, some seen from the side and others from above.
The whole picture is a copper plate of 10.9 by 14.6 centimeters, about the size of a postcard. Jan van Kessel the Elder painted it in Antwerp between about 1653 and 1661. He came from a family of Antwerp painters, and his maternal grandfather was the flower painter Jan Brueghel the Elder. Van Kessel turned out dozens of these insect studies on wood or copper, probably for collectors' cabinets of curiosities.
Making that many plates called for a method, and a second version in the National Gallery of Art in Washington shows what it was. It repeats the same currant sprig with ten insects instead of twelve, and seven of its species come back here in new positions. Van Kessel probably kept a stock of separate insect studies and recombined them from one plate to the next.
Recombining did not mean mixing at random. The spotted caterpillar crawling along the twig at the center is the larva of the magpie moth, and its adult form, white with black spots, rests on the currants at the right. In real gardens, that caterpillar feeds on currant and gooseberry leaves.
At a Glance
Artist: Jan van Kessel the Elder (1626 to 1679)
Painted: About 1653 to 1661, Antwerp
Medium: Oil on copper
Size: 10.9 × 14.6 cm (4.3 × 5.7 in)
Where to see it: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
11. Still Life with Poppy, Insects, and Reptiles, Otto Marseus van Schrieck (c. 1670)
A small pale moth sits beside the open mouth of a snake in this still life by Otto Marseus van Schrieck, painted in Amsterdam around 1670. The snake slides out from behind the stem of a tall red poppy that rises from damp moss, with a lizard, two snails and a cluster of mushrooms at its foot. Higher up, a white butterfly rests on a poppy leaf, and an orange one flies near the upper left, above an oversized dragonfly.