One Fine Show: ‘Little Beasts: Art, Wonder and the Natural World’ at the National Gallery of Art
Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
Fearmongering is one of the major pleasures of going into a pharmacy these days. You can never tell what new product they’ve decided to lock up, with the implication that deranged people are stealing it for inscrutable purposes. And what new plight will be depicted on lurid fliers? Lately, I’ve been noticing more warnings about the dangers of ticks. These are always accompanied by drawings at 10,000x scale, the insects becoming furry and menacing, like savage woodchucks that might not only give you Lyme disease but also steal your toddler. Ticks were never something we cared about when I was a kid. My brother and I would return from our adventures in the woods looking like blueberry bushes, absolutely covered in ripe, swollen bloodsuckers.
A new pair of exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History explore this genre of wondrous disgust at a higher level. “Little Beasts: Art, Wonder and the Natural World” collects seventy-five prints, drawings and paintings alongside some sixty objects dedicated to the intersection of science and art in 16th- and 17th-century Europe. The exhibitions feature depictions of insects and animals by Joris and Jacob Hoefnagel, Jan van Kessel, Albrecht Dürer, Teodoro Filippo di Liagno and Wenceslaus Hollar and by other artists and zoological illustrators.
Bugs are the heart of this exhibition because they were such a contemporary oddity, classified as “little beasts”—beestjes in Dutch—“little worms” and even “little birds.” Curators at the NGA worked with their colleagues at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History to identify every creature in van Kessel’s Insects and a Sprig of Rosemary (1653), which renders the plant as some strange futuristic architecture populated by eleven vivid and specimens, all painted in three dimensions, with shadows and a hypothetical, inconsistent light source. But that’s okay—these friendly little monsters are on a catwalk.
But the showstopper would seem to be the excerpts from Joris Hoefnagel’s Four Elements, a series of 270 biological watercolors made in the late 1500s. Unlike most of the works in this show, these were not created for public consumption but to show his friends and patrons. You can tell these are precious, especially his Southern Hawker Dragonfly (c. 1575/1590s), which is a little jewel, with crystalline wings and an abdomen that slinks like a fancy bracelet. The scales of his crocodiles are no less impressive or valuable.
If these works are accurate, they feel very intimate and personal, too. When these studies were bound and printed, they were distributed into their appropriate elements, with birds collected in the volume Aier, etc. Curiously, his insects were collected under Ignis, or fire. Perhaps there’s something a little demonic about exploring these many-legged kingdoms. It does force you to reconsider a human-centric understanding of the world.
“Little Beasts: Art, Wonder and the Natural World” is at the National Gallery of Art through November 2, 2025.
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