Breaking the butterfly upon the wheel of today's fashion-art
It is not difficult to imagine what Whistler would have said about the fashion artist who presents hundreds of butterfly and moths' wings stuck together in a pattern as his latest masterpiece: 'If he wants to transform butterflies into art, why doesn't he paint them?' Butterflies are indeed beautiful creatures, not merely in the colours, but in the infinitely varied shape of their wings, which, in a curious way, represent all the style of art through the ages — the classical, the gothic, the baroque and rococo, even the art nouveau and art deco.
Whistler, the unsatisfactory cadet from West Point who wanted to flit from one world to another in search of nectar, portrayed himself as a butterfly and adopted it as his symbol or logo. His butterfly signature is to be seen on countless drawings and watercolours and on some of his paintings. The Art Institute of Chicago Museum has hundreds of his butterfly sketches, many reproduced in the sumptuous Yale catalogue raisonne of his works on paper. He drew butterflies bowing and running, saying goodbye and making speeches, snorting with disdain or expressing anger: all the things Whistler did himself. He illustrated his books with butterflies: both The Gentle Art of Making Enemies and The Baronet and the Butterfly, his rant against Sir William Eden, whom he accused of underpaying him for his portrait of Lady Eden. When he held his first big exhibition in Pall Mall, he not only arranged every detail of the decor — Whistler was the first modern interior decorator, making William Morris seem grotesquely out-of-date — but designed and drew his own invitation cards, attaching to them the 'butterfly favours' which he had cut out of yellow silk and which those attending the show were expected to wear. You might say that Whistler was the first artistic spin doctor, had not Salvator Rosa anticipated him in that role. Certainly, in conducting his own PR campaigns and artistic showmanship, not to say effrontery, he was an innovator of genius, so that he became if not a household name, at any rate a drawing-room one, synonymous with the profession and pretension of the artist in his generation (as Picasso, who had similar PR gifts, was in the next). All the same, and despite his odious character (there again, he and Picasso had a lot in common), Whistler was a great artist, both profoundly (and superficially) original, producing more novelties of vision and technique than any of his Impressionist contemporaries, and practising his art with a variety of exquisite skills that have rarely been equalled. He was always inventing, always learning and teaching himself — an example to any young artist setting out today, and a reproach to the gross and clumsy monsters who dominate the fashion-art world.
don't know who first painted a butterfly with skill and accuracy, though they feature on Roman mosaics and mediaeval tapestries. One of the first must have been Jacques Le Moyne de Morges, who flourished about 1564-88. He was a Huguenot who went to what was then the French colony in Florida, escaped from Paris at the time of the Massacre of St Bartholomew, came to England and was taken up by Sir Walter Raleigh, that superb Elizabethan talent spotter. In that matchless depository of treasures, the V&A, there are 34 sheets by him, chiefly of vases of flowers but including both an exotic butterfly from Florida and a magnificent rendering of an English red admiral. He is rivalled by that strange and charismatic artist John White, who was active from the 1570s to the turn of the century, and must have been a slightly older contemporary of Shakespeare. White was not only a skilful artist, but had a modern eye. He painted sights we, today, want to see. Another of Raleigh's protégés, he went on the abortive attempt to establish the colony of Virginia at Roanoke, but escaped with his life and returned home to describe what he had seen in pen and watercolour (which was also Francis Drake's chosen medium for his sketches). His painstaking rendition of Red Indians, their villages and farms are important historical documents. But he also made a masterly study, now in the British Museum, of the Virginia butterfly, since called the swallow-tail. This work is in pen and black ink and watercolour, heightened by white gouache, a truly amazing creation and a minor masterpiece of the English Renaissance.
Later artists of the butterfly tended to be Dutch or French. The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco has a fine collection of Lepidoptera paintings. It includes a work by Johannes Bronchorst (1648-1727), 'Six Butterflies and a Caterpillar', done in watercolour on glazf.cl paper, which set a new standard of excellence. Alongside it is perhaps the finest butterfly painting in the world, a magnificent gouache on black-painted vellum. It features two butterflies, one red-and-green-winged, the other blue-grey with red spots, in a composition of a dandelion in bloom, a snail and a beetle. It is by Barbara Regina Dietzsch (1706-83), the most brilliant of a family who specialised in insect art.
Louis XIV, who despite his many iniquities,
loved gardens and the insects that flourished in them, appointed in 1677 a genius called Claude Aubriet (c. 1665-1742) 'Painter to the King's Cabinet and the Jardin du Roi.. This man painted for his master shellfish, starfish and octopuses, and completed 42 vellums of saltwater fish mainly at Marly, where the king had a vast salt pond. But he was also fascinated by the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into butterfly and by the changing colours and patterns produced when butterflies opened or folded their wings. His magnum opus on this subject was never finished, but many studies remain, shown in the Bibliotheque Nationale, including a breathtaking 'Group of Butterflies' in watercolour and gouache on vellum, which any collector of fine art would dearly love to possess. He was succeeded by Madeleine Bassaporte, who did more than 300 vellums in her long career. Women include some of the leaders in this genre — I am thinking for instance of Miriam Sybilla Merian, perhaps the finest of them all. But my own particular favourite was George Dionysus Ehret (1708-1773), who worked at Badminton, did butterflies and moths but also painted a tiny masterpiece, 'Horsefly', a miracle of observation, glitter and colour, now one of the delights of the Oxford Ashmolean.
Reflecting on these enchanting products of human skill, industry and devotion to beauty and perseverance in this most exacting of the arts — I am ashamed of our own age, which substitutes for art a process of mere taxidermy. though carried out with a coarseness which would make a genuine taxidermist tremble with anger. I don't know whether cruelty is involved in this form of fashion-art, and if so how much. But I was not impressed by a 'spokesman' who defended the work by saying that butterflies only lived for a few hours anyway. I am not a lepidopterist but! have heard that some butterflies live for two years or more. They are certainly much sturdier creatures than one might suppose. Darwin, ten miles off the South American coast, saw what he called a 'butterfly show' filling the sky; even with a telescope, he added, it was not possible to see a space free from them. In the ocean off Ceylon, swarms of migrating butterflies have been seen stretching miles up into the sky, which took days to pass a given spot. They have been seen in midAtlantic and, more commonly. flying from France to Kent. When Pope spoke of 'breaking a butterfly upon a wheel', he was perhaps referring to modern art. I remind its practitioners of Blake's wording: 'Kill not the moth nor butterfly/for the Last Judgement draweth nigh'.
Previous page
