Insect have long had a place in the art world, from ancient Egyptian scarabs and Salvador Dalí’s swarming ants, to the Asian craft of beetlewing embroidery and Damien Hurst’s In and Out of Love (White Paintings and Live Butterflies).
Recently, a team of curators and conservators from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City was examining Vincent van Gogh’s Olive Trees, one of 18 works on the theme by the Dutch Post-Impressionist.
Most of these works were created when he was being treated at a psychiatric facility in the French town of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (birthplace of Nostradamus, too) in 1889 and 1890. Under magnification, the museum team spotted an unexpected visitor in the painting’s impasto—pieces of a small grasshopper.“We think that the dead grasshopper was probably blown into the painting by the wind and got caught in the thick paint,” says Kathleen Leighton, a media relations manager at the museum. “Van Gogh used to paint very quickly with very thick paint, so he probably did not realize it was there. But we are not totally sure about that.”
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