Madame Butterfly

Is a piece inspired by the very interesting life of feisty Victorian English Lepidopterist Margaret Fountaine (1862-1940).

Margaret Fountaine travelled the world, collecting more than 22,000 butterflies from sixty countries on six continents over fifty years and became an expert in tropical butterfly life-cycles. She also published extensively and wrote a diary of more than a million words.

Wealthy and independent, Fountaine was ahead of her time in terms of what it meant to be a woman. She began her travels after being abandoned by the man she hoped to marry, but she seems to have attracted many other men throughout her long life (including a Sicilian bandit and a Hungarian nobleman). However, she found happiness with a handsome Syrian guide and translator who was 15 years her junior. and they lived, worked and travelled together, unmarried, for some 27 years.

Known for her flamboyant hats, seeing off drunken men, robbers, fleas, snakes, mosquitoes, riots, wars, troublesome natives and the odd stray lion, she was known as a force of nature herself.

The picture depicts a composition of butterflies before a mass migration formed in the silhouette of Fontaine studying one of her many specimens.

Produced in a mix of over 650 handcrafted butterflies found in Fontaine’s travels in the tropics, and domestically include Monarchs, Bath Whites, gold metallic Monarchs, and Green Chrysozephyrus. Small gem-like gold discs and hand embellished gold leaf have been added to this composition to amplify the movement a cluster of butterflies makes, popping and sparkling with the light.