How a grasshopper was captured by a Van Gogh painting

5 years ago Mary Schafer, a restorer at the Nelson-Atkins American Museum of Art, was studying Vincent van Gogh’s Olive Trees (1889). In this Impressionist landscape of bluish-green trees, she discovered a curious object on the bottom of the canvas, walled up in layers of thick paint.

“At first I thought it was just a leaf print. But then I realized that it was actually a tiny insect,” Schafer explained in an interview with Rafi Letzer for the authoritative scientific website Live Science.

As it turned out, this unusual find turned out to be an unfortunate grasshopper, which has remained a withered detail of a Van Gogh painting for more than a hundred years.

In his column in the Art Newspaper, Van Gogh specialist Martin Bailey said the museum had recently published new data on the painting, which is inhabited by an insect. Last month, a 28-page analysis of Olive Trees was presented for a new online catalog dedicated to the Nelson-Atkins Museum’s collection of French paintings.

The study, available online and online and in PDF format, notes that Van Gogh painted this painting while in a psychiatric hospital in the commune of Saint-Remy-de-Provence in southeastern France. In May 1889, Vincent van Gogh went there to improve his deteriorating mental health. Then his brother Theo asked the director of the institution to allow the artist to create freely outside the walls of the hospital, according to an article in Art Newspaper.

During the last year of his life spent in the hospital, Van Gogh painted about 150 works, many of which were created in the open air. Olive trees, long growing in the nearby hills of the Alpilles, in June 1889 inspired Van Gogh to create a painting of the same name.

The study also notes that not only a grasshopper was found on the canvas, but also a fragment of a dried plant. Van Gogh often painted outdoors, so it is perhaps not surprising that traces of flora and fauna remained on his canvases from time to time. The powerful wind in the Rhone Valley, known as the mistral, made it particularly difficult to work plein air, given that the wind gusts picked up at certain times of the year, Art Newspaper reports. Such capricious weather increased the likelihood that some extra particles could get into Van Gogh’s paintings.

“The artist, working in the air under the wind, the sun and the eyes of onlookers, fills the canvas somehow, to the best of his ability, but at the same time grasps in nature what is genuine and essential in it, and this is the main difficulty. ”, the artist noted in a letter to his brother Theo in September 1889.

The restorers also discovered that Van Gogh originally gave the painting’s shaded areas a bright purple hue. However, over time, the red pigments of the paint faded, so blue tones now dominate the picture.

“For Van Gogh, it was extremely important that the colors were interconnected, because they give the canvas a special flavor, create harmony, convey a certain mood and evoke true emotions. He very often resorted to a combination of complementary colors, ”explained one of the authors of the study, senior curator for European art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Aimee Marcero DeGalan.

In Olive Trees, for example, Van Gogh depicts bright red poppy flowers next to green leaves, and rich yellow-orange colors are placed close to the blue outlines of individual trees.

As for the fate of the tiny grasshopper, it is likely that he was already dead on the canvas, since the researchers did not find any signs of a struggle around the track. The insect is so small that museum visitors usually don’t notice it without a clue or a magnifying glass.

In an interview with Colin Dwyer for National Public Radio, Marcero DeGalan said that this little grasshopper stuck in the paint helps people better imagine the setting in which the painting was made. “In an instant, you are transported to 1889 in a clearing in front of the hospital, where this grasshopper had an extremely unlucky day – or maybe a lucky one, because we all think about it all these years later.”

Written by Nora McGreevy

Source – Smithsonian

Translation – Daniil Prilepsky, Moskovskaya Pravda