Butterflies and Poppies

Painted at Saint-Rémy in 1889, this close-up study of poppies and butterflies connects Van Gogh's asylum-period naturalism to the Japanese woodblock print tradition he had been studying since his Paris years. His admiration for Japanese artists' treatment of small natural subjects — Hiroshige's birds and flowers, Hokusai's insects and plants — was based on their ability to find complete world in a fragment: a poppy and its butterfly visitor encapsulating the whole of the Mediterranean summer in a contained pictorial space. The poppy was also a plant he associated with the Provençal landscape specifically — he had painted fields of poppies at Arles and observed them growing wild in the asylum garden at Saint-Rémy. The butterfly adds a dimension of transience and delicacy that the flower alone could not supply: both are brief, seasonal, dependent on the precise conditions of a specific moment. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Van Gogh uses the intimacy of scale to achieve concentrated intensity — each poppy bloom, stem, and butterfly wing given close, individual attention. The white and orange butterflies are rendered with fine, specific marks that distinguish them clearly from the more broadly handled foliage surrounding them.