For 128 years, bug stuck in Van Gogh’s painting went unnoticed
A novel way to indirectly put the question of does life imitate art or does art imitate life.
“But just go and sit outdoors, painting on the spot itself!” Vincent wrote. “Then all sorts of things like the following happen — I must have picked up a good hundred flies and more off the 4 canvases that you’ll be getting, not to mention dust and sand … when one carries a team of them across the heath and through hedgerows for a few hours, the odd branch or two scrapes across them…”
Only in this case, it was a grasshopper—and it didn’t get picked off.
A team of curators, conservators and outside scientists had been doing more research on the 104 French paintings in the Nelson’s collection. Conservator Mary Schafer was looking at the oil painting under magnification when she discovered the grasshopper.
Vincent Van Gogh’s painting “Olive Trees” includes part of a small grasshopper embedded in the paint in the lower foreground. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Perhaps the abstract surrealism of this was embedded in the final rendering of this article.
Casual visitors looking at “Olive Trees” in the museum’s Bloch Galleries will not notice the grasshopper.