With the Age of Enlightenment, former associations of butterflies became obscure, and they were most often included in increasingly faithful paintings of natural history.

Painted in 1804, Johann Amandus Winck’s magnificent still life of Flowers and Fruits on a Stone Ledge with Butterflies and Mice makes good use of two butterflies, a housefly (perhaps a vanitas reference), a mouse and a snail.

For William Holman Hunt, in his Our English Coasts, 1852, native species of butterfly were a symbol of the British countryside. Composed from several passages from different motifs, it was assembled in a similar way to the Pre-Raphaelites’ figurative works. Hunt went to great lengths to work from nature: the peacock butterflies at the lower left were one of the last details to be completed, and were painted from a single live specimen the artist examined indoors after the rest of the painting was all but complete.

One of the few paintings that captures the experience of dense clouds of butterflies is Gustave Doré’s Summer from about 1860-70. Set in what appears to be an upland or alpine meadow, its butterflies look like large flowers that have taken to the air.

In Charles Edward Perugini’s undated Ephemeral Joy, a young woman who has been picking flowers in a garden pauses with a brimstone butterfly on the back of her hand. This species was seen as quintessentially British, although it’s widespread throughout Europe, Asia and North Africa.

Although numerous paintings of butterflies had been made from dead specimens, some of the earliest to attempt to show them in realistic environments appeared in the late nineteenth century, thanks to new wildlife artists like the masterly Bruno Liljefors. Redstarts and Butterflies, from 1885, shows what the artist called ‘five studies in one frame’, five separate studies from nature combined into a single image, including this very dark small tortoiseshell butterfly, which is about to become a meal for one of the insectivorous redstarts.

Late in his career, Vincent van Gogh painted the largest European species of moth, the giant peacock moth, in 1889. Its wingspan can reach 20 cm (8 inches).

The following year, van Gogh painted Butterflies and Poppies (1890), showing what are probably two clouded yellow butterflies rather than brimstones. This appears to have been painted on unprimed canvas.

The Japanese Western-style artist Fujishima Takeji 藤島武二 painted Butterflies in 1904, just before he travelled to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts. Like Doré’s painting above, this shows a dense cloud of butterflies gathering around flowers.

In the twentieth century, butterflies provided an opportunity for artistic invention to take flight. Odilon Redon’s Butterflies, from around 1910, shows a highly imaginative collection of butterflies, flowers, plants, and rocks, many being outlined to emphasise their form.

In Anastasiya Markovich’s recent Effect of Butterfly, the insect’s wings are breaking up into shreds of unreality.

My final painting of this selection is in many ways the most fascinating, based on scenes from one of William Shakespeare’s plays set in faerie style by Richard Dadd during his confinement in London’s Bethlem hospital for the mentally ill.

Dadd’s Contradiction: Oberon and Titania from 1854-8 develops his early faerie paintings into a new and unique style, and was painted for the hospital’s first resident Physician-Superintendent, William Charles Hood.

Dadd takes its theme from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, and there’s hardly a square millimetre of canvas into which he hasn’t squeezed yet another curious detail. Like other great imaginative painters such as Bosch before, Dadd’s dense details dart about in scale: there are tiny figures next to huge leaves and butterflies, and towards the top of this tondo these distortions of scale generate an exaggerated feeling of perspective.

The contradiction of the title refers to the battle of wills between Oberon and Titania centred on an Indian boy. Titania, inevitably somewhat masculine, stands just to the right of centre, the boy bearing her skirts. To the left of centre is the bearded figure of Oberon, an elfin lad holding him back by his right arm. At the right are Helena and Demetrius whose love remains unrequited despite Helena’s efforts. Beyond those central figures is an overwhelming mass of detail, miniature scenes and stories involving hundreds of extras, flowers (including the ‘Morning Glory’ convulvulus at the feet of Titania), leaves, an ornate swallowtail butterfly, a floating jade egg, fungi, and far more.

I think that’s the best place to end.

Butterflies are now most strongly associated with their beauty, fine summer weather, and the transience of their existence. In visual art, they have other interpretations that seem strange today. This article and its sequel tomorrow try to unravel some of those, starting with oddest by far.

Cornelis van Haarlem’s The Fall of the Titans from 1588-90 might seem a strange painting in which to find butterflies. This shows the classical myth in which the gods have defeated the Titans who preceded them. As a result the Titans fell from the heavens and were imprisoned in Tartarus, or Hell, as shown here. It’s claimed that flying insects, including butterflies, were associated with the fire of the underworld, although the two butterflies and one dragonfly here appear quite incongruous.

Another early painting of butterflies is also unusual. Dosso Dossi shows the senior of the classical gods painting butterflies in a pseudo-Christian act of creation in his Jupiter, Mercury and Virtue from 1524. The underlying myth stems from a quarrel between Virtue and Fortune, a case brought by Virtue to Jupiter. But he is too busy painting the wings of butterflies, so Mercury tells her to wait before pleading her case. Jupiter’s painting is so real, like that of Apelles, that as he completes each butterfly it takes life and flies off. Behind him is a rainbow providing the brilliant colours for his painting, making it an allegory of painting as well.

Edward Poynter’s painting of Psyche in the Temple of Love from 1882 tells a story from classical mythology that has been painted with butterflies on several occasions. Cupid has fallen in love with Psyche, and takes her to the Temple of Love where he visits her each night, but never in daylight. Here Psyche is whiling away the daytime, holding a sprig out to attract a butterfly as her attribute, although the common and prosaic small white rather than anything more exotic. However, Psyche’s enemy Venus is not far away, as shown by the doves in the temple behind her.

By the early nineteenth century, Europeans were travelling overseas to look for exciting new species of butterfly. Carl Spitzweg’s The Butterfly Catcher from about 1840 shows every hunter’s dream: discovering the largest, most spectacular butterflies ever seen. Compare the size of the hunter’s net with the unrealistically large butterflies in the foreground.

Winslow Homer’s Butterflies from 1878 shows a young woman hunting eastern tiger swallowtail butterflies with her net. This swallowtail species is widespread in the eastern USA, and related to the Old World swallowtail found across Europe. She’s carrying a box in which to place her specimens, in which they’d be killed, ready to mount in a glass cabinet. Collecting butterflies was considered sufficiently ladylike, because of their beauty, while less aesthetically satisfying insects such as beetles were left to male entomologists.

Sophie Anderson entered the faerie painting sub-genre with Take the Fair Face of Woman, and Gently Suspending, With Butterflies, Flowers, and Jewels Attending, Thus Your Fairy is Made of Most Beautiful Things from 1880. The title is taken from some verse allegedly by Charles Ede, although the only literary person of that name who I can identify was born long after this work was completed. Not only are there butterflies adorning this fairy’s hair, but she also appears to have butterfly wings.

The ephemeral lives of butterflies made them a popular candidate for vanitas paintings expressing a weariness of earthly life.

The first of those started to appear in the early sixteenth century. In Jan Sanders van Hemessen’s Vanitas from about 1535-40, an androgynous angel with butterfly wings cradles a human skull with fragmentary Latin inscriptions. Those wings were modelled after the swallowtail butterfly.

A few years later, an anonymous follower of Hieronymus Bosch painted Christ among the Doctors (c 1545), with a large butterfly settled in the foreground.

Many other paintings of butterflies simply represent their beauty.

Pisanello’s egg tempera Portrait of a Princess, showing Ginevra d’Este in 1435-49, surrounds her with flowers and four butterflies. The two on the left are red admirals, and one of the right is a swallowtail, two of the larger and more spectacular species that are abundant in southern Europe.

For their familiarity, bright colours, and natural beauty, butterflies were popular in the Dutch Golden Age, particularly in smaller paintings such as still lifes destined for the collector’s cabinet. Nicolaes de Vree’s undated A Forest Floor Still Life with Flowering Plants and Butterflies from the latter half of the seventeenth century, is a fine example of a painting that goes beyond the normal still life and depicts a more natural scene.

Jan van Os’s Flowers from about 1780 is a much later example, featuring a peacock, swallowtail and red admiral. Each would have been painted from a dead specimen in a collection; collections became popular as the Age of Enlightenment encouraged the better-educated to take an active interest in developing sciences such as entomology.