Butterfly Chaser is an exceptional work painted in 1951 by Thomas Hart Benton, a titan of American modernism. A deeply personal painting, Butterfly Chaser has remained in the artist’s family since its execution.

Every year, to mark the occasion of his daughter Jessie’s birthday, Benton produced a new painting as a gift to her. For her first birthday, he painted Jessie, One Year Old, which depicts roses, her cat, and a large butterfly. Over the years, Jessie’s favorite things were represented in these special birthday paintings. For her fourth birthday, Benton painted four flowers, for her seventh, seven sailboats, and for her eleventh, an easel and eleven brushes. Benton honored Jessie’s twelfth birthday with a different approach to the subject in Butterfly Chaser. She had requested butterflies, and naturally, expected a dozen winged creatures.

In this ambitious composition “of unusually complex visual rhythms,” Jessie chases a butterfly in a bucolic Martha’s Vineyard setting. [1] The lush flora and vibrant palette recall the pastoral scenes of Venetian Renaissance painter Titian, and the density of forms and colors anticipate the allover compositions found in the Abstract Expressionist drip paintings of Benton’s most famous student, Jackson Pollock. Consistent with his practice, Benton produced a careful study for Butterfly Chaser in oil on board.

While Benton’s landscape may seem idyllic, upon closer inspection, several unexpected objects stand out in the foreground, including an old shoe and a rusty tin can. Nestled along a tree stump, these objects evoke the passage of time and add Butterfly Chaser to the robust tradition of memento mori painting, which rose to prominence in the seventeenth century. This type of painting intends to remind the viewer of the ephemerality of human life through the depiction of items including clocks, extinguished candles, fruit, and flowers, such as the pink blossoms that appear in the upper right quadrant of Butterfly Chaser. The fleeting nature of the chased butterfly adds an additional layer of meaning to the passage of time that is the very essence of the birthday pictures series.

Benton gave Jessie a new painting every year until she turned eighteen, along with occasional paintings into her adulthood. Butterfly Chaser is one of two examples from the series identified by scholar Henry Adams as an outstanding achievement: “Two of his finest paintings were executed for this ‘birthday’ series: Butterfly Chaser of 1951, which shows Jessie chasing a butterfly in the distance, and Jessie with Guitar of 1956.” [2] Butterfly Chaser held special significance for Jessie Benton as well, and she reserved a place of pride for the painting above her fireplace in her home for many years.