Butterfly watch

An appreciation of sublimity and beauty in nature was fundamental to the Romantic sensibility.This embraced not only love of landscape, but close study of all its constituent parts. The critic John Ruskin urged his readers to study the flowers, plants and creatures to be found in nature. Painting landscapes, flowers, insects and shells on ceramics was widely practised in English and Welsh factories and was admired and imitated all over Europe. These beautifully observed butterflies are taken from a painted porcelain plaque, possibly an apprentice piece, that was made in Derby, England, c.1830.