Sprig of White Currant with Insects

Entry

Displayed in this work are twelve insects round a sprig of berries.¹⁰ The sprig is a member of the red currant family, Ribes rubrum, and is the then comparatively recent variety with transparent fruit, the white currant. Carolus Clusius (1525-1609) noted in 1589 that this had been grown in England.

The insects in the top row, reading from left, are: a tiger beetle, (family Cicindelidae, perhaps Cicindela silvatica (Linnaeus)); a whirligig beetle (family Gyrinidae), slightly inaccurately depicted; probably a rust fly (family Psilidae, perhaps Psila fimetaria (Linnaeus)); a longicorn beetle (family Cerambycidae), and unmistakably the grape wood borer (Chlorophorus varius (Müller), not found in the Netherlands today, but rather in central Europe).

The insects in the second row, reading from the left, are: a crane fly (Tipulidae, family Nephrotoma), inaccurately depicted from a dead specimen; a cream-spot tiger moth (Arctia villica (Linnaeus), found in the penultimate century in the south of the Netherlands, with a wingspan of 45 to 60 mm); a magpie moth caterpillar (family Geometridae, Abraxes grossulariata (Linnaeus) whose habitat is currant bushes) probably drawn from life, in a characteristic pose, although it is curious that it is shown with a head at each end; a female wall brown butterfly (Lasiommata megera (Linnaeus), family Satyridae, with a wingspan of 36 to 50 mm); a magpie moth (family Geometridae, Abraxes grossulariata (Linnaeus), wingspan 18 to 25 mm).

The insects on the third, bottom row, reading from the left, are: a fly (family Dryomyzidae, perhaps Neuroctena anilis); a firebug (possibly Pyrrhocoris apterus (Linnaeus), family Pyrrhocoridae); a mayfly (probably Palingenia longicauda), an ephemera not accurately shown by confusing the length of the antennae with that of the forelegs.

There can be no doubt that this signed painting is an authentic work by Jan van Kessel. Delicately executed with at least some underdrawing (on what may have been a pinkish imprimatura layer), the overlaps were reserved, while the sgraffito technique and powdered gold were used to render the butterfly. An unsigned variant in the Washington National Gallery of Art consists of ten, as opposed to twelve, insects of which seven are the same and some are differently placed around the same sprig of white currant.¹¹ Similar sprigs occur as centrepieces in other displays, but this sprig seems not to have been otherwise repeated exactly in Van Kessel’s extant corpus of such works. Baadj¹² discusses the repetition of motifs in Van Kessel’s insect paintings, and some of the insects in the Rijksmuseum painting are repeated elsewhere: for instance, the tiger beetle in a painting sold at an anonymous sale in London, 1999;¹³ the mayfly and magpie moth in one of a set of four in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford,¹⁴ the caterpillar in a painting in the High Art Museum, Atlanta;¹⁵ and the longicorn beetle in a work of 1659 with the dealer Van Haeften, 2007.¹⁶

There are about sixty-five paintings of this type by Van Kessel extant, of which some are dated, between 1653¹⁷ and 1661.¹⁸ The Rijksmuseum picture was presumably executed in this timespan. Wheelock dates it and the Washington picture to the mid-1650s. As the present picture is signed, it was perhaps painted first; Ertz and Nitze-Ertz date the Washington version to the late 1660s.¹⁹

Van der Willigen and Meijer²⁰ have suggested that some, now independent paintings may have been executed as part of a composite work, subsequently broken up. Those on smaller supports would have been grouped round a larger central member, like the assemblage in the Mellon collection.²¹ This formula may have been inspired by paintings by the Franckens (e.g. SK-C-286), although these were executed on a single support. If such was the case in the majority of instances, then the fact that this aspect of Van Kessel’s production is very rarely documented in contemporary sources would be explained by comparatively few composites having been created. Others, however, were executed as paintings in their own right; Van Kessel featured such an individual work for instance in his Interior of a Picture Gallery, an Allegory of Sight of 1659 at Karlsruhe.²² Whether the Rijksmuseum picture was originally part of a composite is impossible to say; its measurements are nearly those, identified by Van der Willligen and Meijer, as being of this category. The number 6 inscribed on the reverse might indicate that it was part of such a grouping.

This type of painting, which became a speciality of Van Kessel’s, has been called a study,²³ which suggests an ongoing process, although its characteristic is one of high finish. A display may be a more accurate description. As Meijer²⁴ has observed, they are not trompe l’œil paintings, but an arrangement of discrete studies, with the animals differently viewed, some from the side and others from the top (as is the case in the present painting). He states that they are rendered life-size and very accurately (though mistakes have been observed in the Rijksmuseum display) and were rarely repeated (but see above).

No survey has been made of all of the animals depicted by Van Kessel, so it is impossible to state the proportion of those native to the Netherlands against those whose habitats were elsewhere, and therefore to speculate on whether Van Kessel relied on imported, preserved specimens. In the case of the present picture most of the species would have been available to Van Kessel in and round Antwerp and so could have been recorded from life. But the mayfly with its short lifespan and the longicorn beetle (today only found in central Europe) may have been studied from preserved specimens.

Schütz has provided the historical background to the depiction of naturalia.²⁵ Van Kessel may have known the work of Joris Hoefnagel (1542-1600) as relayed by his son’s engravings in Archetypa Studiaque Patris Georgii Hoefnagelii published in 1592.²⁶ More immediately he may have been inspired by small-scale paintings made by his grandfather,²⁷ some of which he may have been able to study in the collection of his uncle, Jan Brueghel II. Baadj has placed this aspect of Van Kessel’s output within the seventeenth-century concept of curiosity.²⁸

Gregory Martin, 2022