Hello everyone, and welcome to another 10 minute talk by the National Gallery.
My name is Clara, one of the Young Producers currently working here,
and today we're going to be talking about an exceptionally small painting,
a painting not much larger than my hand and it is called
'Insects with Common Hawthorn and Forget-Me-Not' and it's essentially a
painting showing a collection of insects and plant specimens together and it's
one of a pair. Today we will only be talking about one of them.
It was painted by the Flemish painter
Jan van Kessel the Elder. He was a painter who specialised in
painting botanical specimens and insects
and he painted this around 1654.
Now, why would an artist, let alone an entire group of artists, specialise
in botanical paintings or make a living from painting insects?
As it turns out there was a huge interest in botany and the study of
nature during 17th century Europe and
there were a number of botanical gardens that were cropping up
across the continent and they were opened for academic study. At the same
time one of the first compact microscopes was produced around
that time in central Europe. There was also the
tulip mania in the Dutch Republic in the 1630s
where people collected tulips for the sake of their
aesthetic beauty and there was a huge explosion of interest
amongst the aristocracy and the academia in nature: botanical studies, insects
and the like. So artists like Jan van Kessel the Elder
and his contemporaries decided to tap into this market and so
they began to produce these type of very small scale paintings.
Now paintings like this would have usually complemented
the curiosity cabinet of a collector and they would have been designed to
have been removed and viewed by the collector alongside his
collection. What's remarkable about van Kessel's work
isn't so much the subject of his paintings
but how he chose to depict them.
As you will see in the painting it's remarkable because
the insects appear to be alive: they're not dead specimens sort of
being stuck on a piece of paper, they're not arranged in a row.
They are flying around, they're crawling across the space
and they appear to be alive. It's as if he painted them
from life which, of course, wouldn't have been possible.
So, essentially, the effect would have been a general sense of
awe or delight, sort of going 'Ahh!' as they remove it
and look at it alongside their collection
of real specimens which would have been dead.
There are different ways that you can enjoy
and admire this painting and there are different layers to it:
on one level it is a very accurate scientific
observation. You can identify every single plant specimen and every
single insect in this painting. It is that
accurately painted but this illustration isn't as
scientific as it might first seem. Anyone would be able to tell,
after looking at it for some time, that the insects are not necessarily to scale
and more importantly they would not be seen
in the same habitat. Also some of the plant specimens shown
would not be in full bloom in the same environment
or would be in the same environment as the insects.
So what we have here is the artist taking a great deal of creative
liberties and producing a piece of art
by making conscious, aesthetic choices. He is making a composition based on
size, positioning as well as lighting and colour so as well as enjoying
this painting because of its scientific value
you can also enjoy it as a simple beautiful piece of art.
It's pretty to look at. A third level of interpretation
of this painting is that it's symbolic. Essentially why would van Kessel choose
this specific assortment of insects and plants? Is it at random
or did he make a conscious decision? As it happens, this idea that plants or
even insects might have a symbolic
meaning is not old. In fact it was established
in the Medieval period, in illuminated manuscripts,
the border illustrations would use plant and insect illustrations to
symbolise certain meanings. Certainly even in Ancient Greece and Rome this
idea would have been quite common as well.
For example, here right in the center of the painting
we have the image of a butterfly which is sitting on top of the common
hawthorn plant. Butterflies, called 'psyche' in
Ancient Greek, were also named after the human soul.
Society is actually the name for the human soul
and Aristotle called the butterfly 'psyche' as well because he saw
similarities with the butterfly and what he understood to be the
characteristics of the human soul or spirit. Ancient writers
and even fathers of the Christian church were fascinated by this idea of
metamorphoses and so this idea of a caterpillar
transferring into a butterfly was sort of seen to represent
the human body breaking free from its material flesh body
and becoming a divine soul. The white butterfly, in particular, was
later developed and understood to be a representation
of Christ himself because white is a symbol of purity.
So the fact that we see a caterpillar on the common hawthorn plant,
turning into a butterfly, which is right in the center,
is perhaps a Christian symbol. The common hawthorn plant itself
is associated with death because the plant is believed to have a very
pungent smell similar to that of a rotting corpse.
The forget-me-not plant just at the very bottom of the
common hawthorn was also a plant used as a sign of
remembrance and was associated with the idea of the
transience of life and how we all eventually die.
So you've got symbols of death represented by the plant and then you've
got a metamorphosis of caterpillar to
butterfly representing, essentially, the Christian
soul or Christ himself triumphing
over death and almost as if van Kessel wanted to reinforce this Christian
message there is a very tiny spider right in the
center and if my identification is correct
this spider would have been a common european garden spider
which in Dutch and German, the literal translation
for its name, would have been a cross spider
and this is because the pattern on its back was supposed to resemble a cross.
So you've got a very small discrete symbol of the cross,
you've got a potential allusion to the resurrection and the triumph of the soul
over death. So suddenly this very tiny and unassuming painting has got
a very complex meaning. What seems to be a secular painting has, in fact, got
a potential spiritual message. Now regardless of whether you believe
this interpretation or not or you're convinced by it, what I've
tried to illustrate here is how even though this painting is very small,
and you might not even notice it, there are different ways you can enjoy
it and there is something in it for everyone.
On one level you can enjoy its scientific accuracy
and you can try to see if you can identify the different specimens.
On another level you can just enjoy it for its aesthetic beauty:
it's just a very simple piece of beautiful art,
and on a third level you can maybe enjoy doing a bit of detective work and
try to see if it has other meanings.
This last interpretation wouldn't have been unlikely as van Kessel was deeply
influenced by artists like Joris Hoefnagel who were known for
their metaphorical and allegorical illustrations
using the natural world as examples. So it's not as unlikely but ultimately
there's something in it for everyone.
If you would like to learn more about our other paintings
feel free to click here and here.
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and thank you very much for listening to this talk. Have a good day. Thank you.