Still Life with Thistle

Born in Nijmegen, in the center of the Netherlands, Marseus van Schrieck worked in Florence and Rome between 1648 and 1663, intermittently in the service of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. He invented the genre of sottobosco, or “forest floor” painting, which encouraged viewers to lower their gaze to ground level and consider the domain of mushrooms, insects, slugs, snails, and small reptiles and amphibians. His nose-to-the-ground focus earned him the nickname “The Sniffer,” and he kept a vivarium of insects, amphibians, and reptiles to study for his paintings. Van Schrieck also innovated in painting technique, sometimes impressing butterfly wings into the wet paint to add naturalistic texture. This late work combines the artist’s interest in crawling things with a monumental study of a thistle that both dominates the canvas and serves as the armature for a host of small animal species.

This genre of painting flourished during a period of waning acceptance of abiogenetic theories that small ground-dwelling creatures could spontaneously generate in the mud and muck excited by the sun’s rays. The development of the microscope by Dutch tradesman and lens-grinder Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was soon to invalidate this, shifting the frontier of the discussion to even smaller organisms like protozoa that could be studied for the first time. Pioneering Cornell professor of entomology Thomas Eisner (1929–2011) identified several of the butterfly species in this painting, including the red admiral (Vanessa atalanta), the cabbage butterfly (Pieris rapae), and the mustard white (Pieris rapi), all of which are found in both old and new worlds. On the general decline of butterfly species globally, Eisner mused, “One wonders whether butterflies will cease to exist in numbers sufficient to inspire the artist? And would still lifes then be rendered truly still?

(Andrew C. Weislogel, A Handbook of the Collections, 2018)