The Green Butterfly

'The Green Butterfly,' undated and now at the Delaware Art Museum, belongs to Moore's smaller-scale works in which a natural object — here a butterfly — introduces a single vivid colour accent into an otherwise harmonically controlled composition. The Delaware Art Museum has a significant holding of British Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic works, and Moore's presence in the collection reflects the transatlantic appreciation for his work that persisted throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A green butterfly set against Moore's characteristic ivory-and-cool-silver palette would constitute a precise colour problem: the warm-green accent calibrated to enhance the surrounding harmony without disrupting it. The butterfly as motif also carries the Aesthetic Movement's association with lightness, beauty without purpose, and the life of pure sensation.

The butterfly's green functions as an accent note within Moore's palette, and achieving the right degree of chromatic intensity required careful glazing over a prepared tonal field. The figure's attention to the butterfly — poised, still, about to land or just alighted — gives Moore a static figure posture appropriate to his aesthetic of suspended animation rather than action.