Butterflies and Poppies

Butterflies and Poppies was painted at Saint-Rémy in 1889, representing a different scale and attention than Van Gogh's large landscape paintings of the period. The close focus on poppies and their insect visitors connects to a strand of Japanese influence that had been important to him since his time in Paris — he admired the Japanese capacity to find profound beauty in small, transient natural phenomena. The poppy, a flower of the Mediterranean summer, appears repeatedly in Van Gogh's Provençal work as a symbol of the intense, fleeting beauty of the southern landscape, and the butterflies add a further note of delicacy and ephemeral life.

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.