From 18 Might to 2 November 2025, the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork, Washington, presents the exhibition “Little Beasts: Art, Wonder, and the Natural World”.
Supply: Nationwide Gallery of Artwork, Washington · Picture: Jan van Kessel the Elder, “Insects and a Sprig of Rosemary”, 1653
Due to an unprecedented collaboration with the Smithsonian Nationwide Museum of Pure Historical past (NMNH), the Nationwide Gallery will show practically 75 prints, drawings, and work alongside some 60 objects from NMNH, marking the primary time their collections of artwork and specimens have been displayed collectively. A brand new movie by up to date artist Dario Robleto will additional study the intersection of artwork, science, and the pure world, bringing historical past into dialogue with up to date tradition. The exhibition will likely be on view from Might 18 to November 2, 2025, within the Nationwide Gallery’s West Constructing.
Little Beasts will discover how European artists unfold data about creatures massive and small throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Scientific expertise, commerce, and colonial enlargement led to the research of beforehand unknown or neglected species. In main cities like Antwerp, artists equivalent to Joris and Jacob Hoefnagel and Jan van Kessel created extremely detailed drawings, prints, and work of those bugs, animals, and different beestjes, or “little beasts” in Dutch. Their works impressed generations of artists and naturalists, fueling the burgeoning science of pure historical past. Not often displayed artwork by greater than a dozen others, together with Albrecht Dürer, Teodoro Filippo di Liagno, and Wenceslaus Hollar, will even be on view alongside examples of the interval’s illustrated zoological publications.
The Nationwide Gallery will supply a number of alternatives all through the exhibition for guests to deepen their engagement with the fabric. Digital shows will enable guests to zoom in on small works and be taught extra about their tales. Magnifying glasses, harking back to the lenses Renaissance artists and naturalists would have used, will likely be out there to look at specimens and their creative representations. Take-home nature journals will invite guests to decelerate and observe the pure world, each inside the exhibition and past.
