Shiny, Furry, Glossy, Scaly: Insects on Copper by Jan van Kessel I
Olivia Dill
Figure 1 Jan Van Kessel I, 1658, One of seventeen panels depicting snakes, lizards, flowers, caterpillars, beetles, butterflies and other insects, oil on copper, 39 x 56 cm (15 x 22 in) ,Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Upperville, call no. NW-UL-NW, Photo via Oak Spring Garden Foundation Library catalog.
An oil painting by Flemish painter, Jan van Kessel I (1626-1679) shows a dizzying array of creatures: beetles, lizards, butterflies, moths, a spider, a snail, a praying mantis, two mole crickets and a scorpion, among others (Fig. 1). Some lizards are shown from above with legs outstretched, while the black and yellow salamander at bottom left, dramatically arches its back and stares upward. Some beetles appear in stark profile, while others appear at odd angles almost as if scurrying across the painting’s surface. Others, like the large Hercules beetle at top left are more static, shown from above with their shells opened to reveal delicate, gossamer, unfolded wings. Butterflies and moths too appear around the periphery, some landing, others taking flight. Many are rendered with enough precision to identify their species (Tongiorgi Tomasi 1997, 106). Each casts a shadow on the plain, mottled, blue-grey background, implying their physical presence on the plate in front of us. Untidy in its overall arrangement but still balanced in the weight and distribution of the individual insects, the whole composition feels resolved despite its chaos. While, seventeenth century Netherlandish audiences would have classified this array of animals all as “bloodless animals,” today, with the exceptions of the lizards, we would classify these creatures all as insects.
I was introduced to this painting as a participant in the short course Pioneers of Natural History Illustration, taught on site at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation in April of 2022. I was captivated by both the vivid liveliness that is distinctive of van Kessel’s approach to insects and also by the ways in which the painting dramatically demonstrates several of the aspects that made insects a popular subject of collection, study, and representation in Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe during the seventeenth century. I wish in this short essay to highlight two of those aspects as they appear in van Kessel’s central panel: insects’ exotic origins and their varied surface qualities.
Figure 2 Jan Van Kessel I, 1658, Seventeen panels depicting snakes, lizards, flowers, caterpillars, beetles, butterflies and other insects, oil on copper, 39 x 56 cm (15 x 22 in) and 14 by 19 cm (5.5 x 7.5 inches) ,Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Upperville, call no. NW-UL-NW, Photo via Oak Spring Garden Foundation Library catalog, compiled by author.
This large painting, painted on a sheet of copper, measures about 39 by 56 cms (15 x 22 ins or about the size of a computer monitor). It is the largest in a group of seventeen all painted in 1658 now residing in the Oak Spring Garden Foundation Library collection (Fig. 2). Each of the smaller sixteen paintings is approximately one third the size of the largest panel, 14 by 19 cms (approximately 5.5 x 7.5 inches, half the size of a standard 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper). Scholars have proposed several functions for the group. All seventeen may have been framed together as an elaborate multi-part artwork (Baadj 2013), or they may have adorned the doors of cabinets containing real preserved specimens of the creatures depicted in the plates themselves (Wheelock, 2005; Tongiorgi Tomasi 1997).
Figure 3 Detail in raking light from Jan Van Kessel I’s center panel showing peacock butterfly at bottom left and Hercules beetle at top right. Photo by author.
Nestled in the borders of illuminated manuscripts, or sprinkled around botanical illustrations, prior to the mid-sixteenth century, insects were usually neither the central subject of artworks nor the objects close study by artists or scientists (Neri 2011). During the seventeenth century, the century during which van Kessel lived and worked, artists, scientists, and collectors of curiosities turned increasingly to observing, representing, and collecting insects. At the same time, several radical shifts occurred in Europe in general and the Netherlands in particular. Empirical observation became increasingly trusted among scientists, the advent of the microscope increased artists’ and scientists’ capacity to see small things, European colonial presence in the Americas, Africa, and south-east Asia expanded bringing vast quantities of trade goods to Europe and millions of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. The inter-continental context of Netherlandish insect collecting and representation is visible in van Kessel’s large central panel.
Figure 4 Detail from Jan Van Kessel I’s center panel with peanut headed lantern fly at top left, and mole cricket at bottom right. Photo via Oak Spring Garden Foundation Library catalog.
Even though van Kessel himself spent much of his life in the Flemish city of Antwerp – he was born, married, bought a home and died all in Antwerp (Laureyssens 2003) – many of the insects on his panels were not native to Europe. For example, in the central panel the orange and blue peacock butterfly, native to Europe and ubiquitous in early modern Netherlandish still life paintings, sits diagonally from the Hercules beetle native to South America (Fig. 3). The mole cricket, a garden pest commonly found in seventeenth-century Europe sits nearby a peanut headed lantern fly, a specimen native to South America and in several cases imported as collectibles from Dutch colonies in Curaçao and Suriname (Fig. 4). Van Kessel also plays with the idea of place through the inclusion of a chimera at the panel’s center. The imagined creature, composed by combining animal parts excerpted from printed works, painted albums, and live observation of real creatures (Baadj 2016, 109-113), hails from no place other van Kessel’s mind (Fig. 5). Repeatedly in this panel and its companions van Kessel sets up contrasts between local and foreign insects. This suggests that much of what would have been exciting about his copper panels to viewers may have been the intercontinental origins for the species depicted. Insects from these panels reappear in other paintings representing America, Asia, and Europe as part of a series by van Kessel allegorizing the four continents (Baadj 2013, 225-227). Both in the very real sense of access to imported specimens but also in a symbolic sense, van Kessel, and other early modern artists used representations of insects to suggest that they had access to and control over the world beyond Europe.
Figure 5 Detail from Jan Van Kessel I’s center panel. Photo via Oak Spring Garden Foundation Library catalog.
Another aspect that would have been intriguing about the study of insects during this period was the beautiful, varied appearances of their surfaces. Glossy or shimmering iridescent shells, translucent wings, legs covered with microscopically fine filaments — insect bodies posed many challenges to painters’ ability to observe and represent them. Van Kessel exploited both the properties of materials and painterly artifice to meet that challenge. For example, he dramatically emphasized the surface quality of the Hercules beetle shown in figure 3. He exploited the smoothness of the copper support to paint the shell with very few visible brush strokes, mimicking its smooth surface texture. The shininess of oil paint as a medium recreates the glassiness the shell’s glassiness. He exaggerated this glassiness even further by painting bright white highlights on the beetle’s black head, almost as if the shell reflects an open window behind it. In painting the shell of the beetle at bottom right van Kessel goes beyond oil paint, applying strokes of gold or another metallic pigment to reference the shell’s shimmer (Fig. 6). Even though early modern Europeans did not know the cause of iridescence or have a single word for describing the effect, van Kessel here has still used materials to explore and recreate aspects of the effect. In this way and in many others van Kessel’s oil paintings are a vivid example of the overlap of art, science, and collecting in the early modern world.
Figure 6 Detail in raking light from Jan Van Kessel I’s center panel. Photo by Author.