Insects, Butterflies, and a Dragonfly

This drawing and one other in the Met collection (2004.128) are likely preparatory for two copper paintings on panel, which recreate the drawings exactly [1]. A native of Antwerp and a student of Jan Breughel the Younger, van Kessel often worked in elaborate multi-part compositions consisting of many small paintings on copper supports. Such panels may have been intended for the doors of cabinets that contained specimens of the creatures depicted on them, but many finished panels were framed and hung together as monumental artworks. The copper panels derived from the compositions in The Met collection, may have been intended to hang on the wall as a pair. Ambitious in scale, and complex in both materiality and composition, the multi-work format became a signature of Van Kessel's practice through which the artist made lofty claims for the inventiveness of his compositions and his talent to capture natural forms [2].


Despite their preparatory status, the execution of these sheets is refined, if not quite to the level of one of van Kessel’s finished copper panels. Painted on prepared vellum, executed in multiple stages including underdrawing, and signed and dated at the bottom right, the artist has ensured that the drawings could serve as an autonomous artwork, worthy of being collected themselves.


In this pair of drawings moths native to Africa crawl next to European insects and American butterflies. Many of these species frequented collections amassed by early modern European collectors through global networks of trade and colonialism. Van Kessel depicted some of the insects we see on these sheets in other artworks, reusing the motifs to create novel compositions [3]. The compositions in the Met collection shuffle insects from van Kessel's roster of motifs, bringing together diverse species creating juxtapositions that would never be observed in nature. In generating these imagined combinations, van Kessel plays with the notion of the artist’s generative power and control over nature.

Olivia Dill, 8/20/24


[1] Nadia Baadj, Jan van Kessel I (1626-1679): Crafting a Natural History of Art in Early Modern Antwerp, Harvey Miller Studies in Baroque Art (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2016), 91-92.

[2] Baadj, Jan van Kessel I (1629–1679).

[3] Some of the same insects recur in panels at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation. Jan van Kessel I, Studies of snakes, lizards, flowers, caterpillars, beetles, butterflies, and other insects: a set of seventeen, 1658, oil on copper, sixteen measuring 14 x 19 cm, one measuring 39 x 56 cm, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Upperville.