An Arrowhead Blue Butterfly and a Scotch Bonnet Sea Shell

A remarkable number of drawings by the flower still-life painter Balthasar van der Ast has come down to us. These highly detailed pictures that show rare and exotic plants, shells and insects would have functioned as reference material for van der Ast’s paintings: indeed, various examples can be found directly copied in his intricate still-lives.

Depicted here is an Arrowhead Blue Butterfly, native to North America, and a Scotch Bonnet Seashell, which can be found predominantly in the Western Atlantic Ocean. They most likely were brought to Europe by seamen from the Dutch West India Company, who did good business importing exotic species from foreign territories, for which there was a great interest among European audiences.

Meticulous still-life drawings such as this would also have appealed to seventeenth-century amateurs of botany and people with an interest in zoology. The possibility exists therefore that van der Ast, next to his paintings, also marketed individual sheets such as this as independent art works.

Concerns have been raised about the authenticity of the Museum’s drawing. According to the still-life specialist Sam Segal, the draftsmanship shows too limited refinement to be by van der Ast. The authorship of a strikingly similar drawing, in the Harvard Art Museums, on which the same shell is depicted, was also questioned by Segal.[1]

Although the shell in the Museum’s collection was painted slightly more subtly than the Harvard sheet, for example in the depiction of the undulating structure of the shell, securely attributed drawings by Van der Ast show a noticeably greater sense of naturalism and detail. The medium of oil paint as opposed to gouache is unusual for the artist. Segal’s concerns, therefore, are not ungrounded. The popularity of van der Ast’s pictures could have been an incentive for forgers, and it is possible that both drawings were made after a now lost original.




[1] (Here attributed to) Balthasar van der Ast, Checkerboard Bonnet Shell (Phalium Areola), ca. 1620-40, brown wash and transparent and opaque watercolor, inv. no. 2013.173.