In 1767, the taxonomist Carl Linnaeus coined the term imago to describe the adult stage of an insect’s life cycle, borrowing a Latin word meaning ‘image’ or ‘likeness’.1 He thereby designated the winged insect as the true form of each species: the ‘image’ revealed once an insect has shed its prior disguises as an egg, larva, or pupa. Yet by the nineteenth century, as butterfly and moth (or Lepidoptera) collecting expanded from a fringe activity to become a widespread recreational pastime, the metaphor acquired a deeper resonance. With their spectacular colours, patterns, and symmetries, adult moths and butterflies came to be valued above all as images. Their beauty, argued Christian Friedrich Vogel in his 1822 butterfly guide, ‘is probably the reason why so many collectors place their collected butterflies under glass like pictures, in order to decorate a room.’2 Yet the seventy-eight finely coloured illustrations in Vogel’s book go to show that butterflies were a peculiar kind of picture. In order to create them—a laborious art that encompassed seeking, chasing, catching, killing, spreading, drying, pinning, and arranging—you needed to start with pictures. My PhD project takes this doubling of specimen and image as its point of departure, investigating the role of colour-printed illustrations in transforming moths and butterflies into collectable commodities.
Butterfly Mania and Butterfly Manuals
In the decades around 1900, Lepidoptera collecting flourished on a remarkable scale, giving rise to an explosion of societies, periodicals, exhibitions, and, of course, vast public and private collections. Unsatisfied with local insects, many European collectors desired especially large, colourful, or rare species from the tropics, which were readily available for purchase. During this peak phase of European colonial expansion, millions of ‘exotic’ insects were imported to Europe through extractive networks of labour, shipping, and trade known to contemporaries as ‘the butterfly industry’.3 Existing histories of insect collecting tend to assume that the simultaneous proliferation of identification guides and collecting manuals—a genre of books containing colour illustrations of species alongside names and descriptions—simply catered to this growing interest in insect collecting, in turn often diagnosed as a cultural response to industrialization and urbanization. But considering the centrality of visual pleasure to the collecting phenomenon, I suggest that this relationship was far more complex.
Colour illustrations were in fact a prerequisite to participation; they permitted comparison and classification with an ease that could be afforded neither by lengthy textual description nor by fragile and unwieldy physical collections. And yet, until the late nineteenth century, such images were extremely expensive and laborious to produce at scale. This all changed thanks to a so-called ‘colour printing revolution’, a period of overlapping innovations including chromolithography, photomechanical printing, and synthetic inks, which radically transformed the possibilities and economics of printing colour images on paper.4 Reflecting on the implications for butterfly collecting, the lepidopterist Paul Denso observed in 1910 that butterflies had become popular not only because of their aesthetic appeal, but ‘because a wealth of popular-scientific books and publications made an intensive engagement with them immensely easier.’5 It is worth asking exactly what kind of engagement butterfly books engendered. The illustrations generally followed a set of conventions that Janice Neri has described as ‘specimen logic’: they presented moths and butterflies isolated against a blank page, ordered into serial arrangements, and flattened into the posture of pinned specimens, while food plants, habitats, and even other life stages were left out of the picture.6 Instead of presenting insects as living animals enmeshed in their environments, the images displayed them as collectable and valuable commodities.
Beyond identification guides, butterflies were repeatedly chosen as the privileged motif for demonstrating new possibilities of image reproduction. Illustrations of early three-colour printing regularly used butterflies to present the trick of photographic colour separation, and printing companies returned to them repeatedly to advertise their skill and capabilities, as I discovered in several sources while working at St Bride Library during my fellowship at the GHIL. The business card and catalogue cover below (by the German ink manufacturers Frey & Sening and Berger & Wirth respectively) exemplify this recurring metaphor linking the capture of colour on paper to the capture of butterflies as colourful objects. Such items belonged to a broader boom in collectable printed ephemera, alongside trade cards and postcards, which often explicitly sought to train consumers in the acquisitive logic of the set, the series, and the rare item. The collecting logics embedded in the emergence of industrial colour printing point to another duality of Lepidoptera plates, reflected also in the model of serial and individually wrapped instalments in which many identification guides were published: they depicted collectable objects, but they were also collectables in their own right.


‘Truth to Nature’
At the centre of my research is one specific identification guide: The Macrolepidoptera of the World, edited by Adalbert Seitz and published in instalments in German, French, and English between 1906 and 1954.7 It remains likely the most extensive work on Lepidoptera ever produced, its ambition to represent every species yielding 20 volumes, more than 1,500 plates, and over 50,000 individual illustrations. The Natural History Museum Archives in London hold the letters between Seitz and two of his most prolific contributors, Karl Jordan and Louis Beethoven Prout, allowing me to reconstruct how the book was actually made. The details they contain illuminate a fundamental question: how were images of butterflies rendered credible in an age when accuracy and objectivity were constantly being redefined by new technologies of visual representation?
The routinely invoked criterion for the quality of a zoological illustration at the turn of the twentieth century was Naturtreue, or absolute fidelity to nature, though in practice there was little agreement on what constituted this ideal and which techniques could best achieve it. In his 1900 Butterflies of the United States, East of the Rocky Mountains, the lepidopterist Sherman Denton sought to bypass the problem of representation altogether by gluing the wings of real butterflies directly to the page, ultimately requiring some 50,000 dead insects.8 Seitz, whose publication had a much higher print run, experimented with various methods, aiming to reconcile the objectivity promised by photography with the superior colour results obtained through chromolithography and the practical advantages of hand illustration, which offered a way to standardize specimens and emphasize key identificatory features. For The Macrolepidoptera, photomechanical printing was ultimately retired in favour of a more traditional chromolithographic process, with photography used instead to provide templates and proofs for the illustrators. The letters shed light on the sheer scale of this operation, which demanded 11,000 lithographic stones weighing hundreds of tonnes, as well as the practical difficulties faced by the editor, authors, artists, and publisher over the course of their international collaboration, with fragile specimens often breaking in transit and ink drying before vital corrections could be made.9 Naturtreue, contrary to its simple-sounding promise of fidelity to reality, described a layered and laborious process of image construction.


The Colonial Specimen Trade
If illustrations helped to cultivate the desire to collect butterflies, they also played a key role in the global trade that profited from it. Studying the correspondence of specimen dealerships such as Janson & Sons and Staudinger & Bang Haas in the Natural History Museum Archives, I traced how thoroughly Seitz’s Macrolepidoptera was woven into international commerce. Major moth and butterfly shops reordered their price lists to align with its sequence, while its plates served as a shared visual standard against which buyers and sellers could establish consensus on what was being traded. As the Natural History Museum’s rare collection of specimen catalogues reflects, books and specimens were often sold by the same shops, and marketed to the same broad public of hobby collectors that Seitz’s framing of the work as ‘scientific’ tended to obscure.10
Underlying this commerce was a colonial extraction economy of considerable scale. European demand for large, colourful, ‘exotic’ species was met by firms which imported millions of specimens from across the globe, through the exploitative networks of trade, transport, and labour that accompanied the peak phase of European colonial expansion. Within this economy, illustrated guides assumed a surprisingly instrumental role, with Seitz’s publisher claiming in its adverts that ‘anyone living abroad or in the colonies who owns Seitz’s Macrolepidoptera can enjoy both a profitable side income and absorbing entertainment through the capture and sale of butterflies.’11 The plates, according to this proposition to colonial officials and settlers, offered a means of identifying which species were lucrative enough to be worth capturing and exporting. Since most actual collecting labour was done by local or indigenous workers, often contracted under exploitative conditions, the plates furthermore provided a tool to communicate these desired species across linguistic barriers.12 Meanwhile, the extensive knowledge and skill of the workers upon which the industry relied—including local names as well as ecological knowledge of where and when certain insects could be found—went uncredited by European science in a process of epistemic violence.

Afterimages
Today, butterflies are everywhere: tattooed onto bodies and printed on everything from phone cases to product packaging and greeting cards. These images of butterflies that saturate contemporary visual culture are often reproduced directly from century-old identification guides or seem to copy their visual language. The insects themselves, meanwhile, are in steep decline worldwide as habitats collapse under the consumer economies inaugurated during the period discussed above.13 By tracing the history of how Lepidoptera were made visible and knowable, my research aims to clarify the contradictions that still define the ways we see and value insects.
Feature image: Illustration of three-colour printing by Frederick Oughton (c.1907). Courtesy of Alexandra Loske. Photo: Clive Boursnell.
- Carl Linnaeus, Systema naturae per regna tria naturae, secundum classes, ordines, genera, species, cum characteribus, differentiis, synonymis, locis, 12th edn, 3 vols. (Stockholm, 1767–8), vol. i, pt. ii. 535. [↩]
- Christian Friedrich Vogel, Schmetterlings-Cabinet für Kinder (Leipzig, 1822–8), p. iii. [↩]
- ‘Die Schmetterlingsindustrie’, Internationale Sammler-Zeitung, 7/2 (1910), 103. [↩]
- See Michael Twyman, A History of Chromolithography: Printed Colour for All (London, 2013). [↩]
- Paul Denso, ‘Wie und was muss insbesondere der Schmetterlingssammler sammeln, züchten und beobachten um seinen Fleiss der Wissenschaft nutzbar zu machen?’, Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Insektenbiologie 6 (1910), 157–60. [↩]
- Janice Neri, The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700 (Minneapolis, 2011). [↩]
- Adalbert Seitz (ed.), The Macrolepidoptera of the World, 16 vols. and 4 supplements (Stuttgart, 1906–54). [↩]
- Sherman F. Denton, Moths and Butterflies of the United States, East of the Rocky Mountains (Boston, 1900). [↩]
- Adalbert Seitz, letters to Louis Beethoven Prout, 1900s–1930s, Natural History Museum Archives, London, MSS PRO C 8:8. [↩]
- Price Lists and Catalogues, Natural History Museum Archives, London, MSS CHA H 1:1. [↩]
- Advertisement for Die Großschmetterlinge der Erde, in Entomologische Literaturblätter, 13/4 (1913), 90. [↩]
- Carl Ribbe, ‘Anleitung zum Sammeln von Schmetterlingen in tropischen Ländern’, Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift Iris, 20 (1907), 141. [↩]
- Dave Goulson, Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse (London, 2021). [↩]
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OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Silas Edwards (May 26, 2026). Capturing Images: Butterfly Collecting and the Colour Printing Revolution. German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved June 7, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/169tb
