Grasshopper had a brush with genius

UNITED STATES: Gazing on Vincent van Gogh’s Olive Trees, generations of art lovers have been transported to a blustery grove in the south of France where they could almost feel the warm sunlight filtering through leaves and hear the insects humming in the long grass.

Now a restorer at an art museum in Kansas City has discovered there really is an insect – a grasshopper – in the paint.

‘‘She first thought it was a leaf,’’ Kathleen Leighton, a spokeswoman for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Missouri, said.

The restorer, Mary Schafer, was looking at the 1889 painting under a microscope when she found something that ‘‘did not quite look right’’.

Gradually, under magnification, the outlines of the longdead creature emerged. The grasshopper was in the foreground, near the bottom of the canvas.

Had it mistaken art for life, when it leapt into the picture? Did it have any idea that it was about to become part of the story of European painting?

Schafer had more practical questions. ‘‘It is not unusual to find insects or plant material in a painting that was completed outdoors,’’ she said. ‘‘But in this case we were curious if the grasshopper could be used to identify the particular season in which this work was painted.’’

Michael Engel, a palaeontologist, examined the grasshopper and said it was missing its thorax and abdomen. Nor was there any sign of a struggle. The grasshopper apparently did not suffer for the sake of art.

Leighton said: ‘‘They believe that the grasshopper was dead and it was probably blown by the wind into the paint.’’

Van Gogh had complained about this sort of occurrence in a letter to his brother, Theo, in 1885. Talking about the fashion in painting for staged oriental scenes ‘‘or of a reception at a cardinal’s by some Spaniard or other’’, he wrote: ‘‘All these exotic paintings are painted in THE STUDIO.

‘‘But just go and sit outdoors, painting on the spot itself! Then all sorts of things like the following happen – I must have picked a good hundred flies and more off the 4 canvases that you’ll be getting, not to mention dust and sand.’’

Leighton said the artist also had a habit of rolling up his canvasses while they were still wet.

Olive Trees was painted in 1889, after Van Gogh had admitted himself to the asylum at Saint-Remy. He died in 1890. –

SUPPLIED This photo shows a small grasshopper that has been found embedded in the thick paint in the lower foreground of Vincent van Gogh’s painting ‘‘Olive Trees’’.