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The Butterfly Art Gallery

The beauty of butterflies has long made them a popular subject amongst artists and photographers. The watercolour paintings of Richard Lewington and Charles McCubbin, and the oil paintings of Richard Tratt are well known, but did you know that Vincent van Gogh, Andy Warhol, and even the creator of this website have dabbled in butterfly art ?

Ornithoptera and Cethosia © Adrian Hoskins
 
This image was inspired by the famous quotation by the explorer Alfred Russell Wallace :
 

"During my first walk into the forest I had seen sitting on a leaf out of reach, an immense butterfly of a dark colour, marked with white and yellow. I could not capture it, as it flew away high up in the forest, but I at once saw that it was a female of a new species of Ornithoptera, the pride of the eastern tropics. I was very eager to get it, and to find the male, which in this genus is always of extreme beauty.

During the 2 succeeding months I only saw it once again, and shortly afterwards I saw the male flying high in the air at the mining village. I had begun to despair of ever getting a specimen, as it seemed so rare and wild, till one day about the beginning of January, I found a beautiful shrub with large leafy bracts and yellow flowers, a species of Mussaenda, and saw one of these noble creatures hovering over it, but it was too quick for me and flew away.

The next day I went again to the same shrub, and succeeded in catching a female, and the day after, a fine male. I found it to be as I had expected, a perfectly new and most magnificent species, and one of the most gorgeously coloured butterflies in the world. Fine specimens of the male are more than seven inches across the wings, which are velvety black and fiery orange, the latter colour replacing the green of the allied species.

The beauty and brilliance of this insect are indescribable, and none but a naturalist can understand the intense excitement that I experienced when I at length captured it. On taking it out of my net and opening the glorious wings, my heart began to beat violently, and I felt much more like fainting than I have done when in apprehension of immediate death. I had a headache the rest of the day, so great was the excitement produced by what to most people will seem an inadequate cause".

 

Great Peacock moth © Vincent Van Gogh
 

Butterfly © Andy Warhol
 

Swallowtails © Richard Tratt
 

Some beautifully illustrated butterfly books :

Butterflies of Britain & Europe, Tolman and Lewington ( 1977 ), Harper Collins
Field Guide to the Moths of Great Britain & Ireland, Waring, Townsend & Lewington, BWP
Australian Butterflies, McCubbin ( 1971 ), Nelson. very highly recommended !
Butterfly Landscapes, Tratt ( 2005 ), Langford Press
 

 

 

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All photographs, artwork, text & website design are the property of Adrian Hoskins ( unless otherwise stated ) and are protected by Copyright. Photographs or text on this website must not be reproduced in part or in whole or published elsewhere without prior written consent of Adrian Hoskins / learnaboutbutterflies.com

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