Painters have slipped butterflies into their pictures for four centuries, often so small that a visitor walks past without noticing them. Up close, the insect is rarely there by chance. In one of these twelve paintings, a god leaves his thunderbolts lying on a cloud to paint butterfly wings himself, and the idea comes from a Renaissance dialogue about how busy the gods are.
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How We Chose These 12 Paintings
A butterfly is small enough to sit on a petal or at the edge of a scene, and its patterned wings let a painter show how fine his brush was. It also brings color and the idea of flight into a picture where nothing else moves.
The insect carried a meaning too. A crawling caterpillar turns into a winged adult, so Christian art made the butterfly an image of the soul rising after death. Beside cut flowers, it recalled how quickly beauty runs out.
Butterflies turn up in thousands of paintings, so the insect alone never earned a place here. Each picture had to paint its butterflies or moths with the same care as its main subject, and carry a story of its own. Half come from Dutch and Flemish flower pieces, the rest from later painters.
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 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, now 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 a tall red poppy, and a lizard, two snails and a cluster of mushrooms crowd the damp moss at its foot. Few painters of the time knew such creatures this well. Marseus went looking for them himself, and the way he did it earned him a nickname among the Dutch painters in Rome.