Preserving the Perfect State: Titian Peale's Butterflies

This essay explores the ways in which artist-naturalist Titian Ramsay Peale's Lepidoptera collections—one of the oldest collections of butterflies in the United States—intersect with nineteenth-century notions of time and metamorphosis. Peale's repeated deployment of the insects in a variety of visual media exposes a consistent nineteenth-century interest in perfection and its preservation.