Butterflies recur throughout Charles Blackman’s oeuvre. They flutter through his gardens, streets and Wonderland, winking at the ideas of transformation, hope and imagination. In this series of exceptionally rare etchings, each hand-signed by the artist and never brought to numerical edition, Blackman focuses solely on the butterfly, finding in its form a menagerie of symbolism. 

For humans, the butterfly bears a multitude of connotations – hope, transformation, purity, evil, life and death. The seventeenth-century Dutch naturalist Jan Swannerdam argued that in their evolution from caterpillar to cocoon and then butterfly lay a metaphor for life, purgatory and resurrection. In 1881, when Tsar Alexander II was assassinated, great flocks of red admiral butterflies appeared across Russia. For some, their arrival was foreboding with the year, “1881”, deciphered in the lattice of their wings.

Outside of the human imagination, butterflies remain creatures of unexpected tenacity. Every November, millions of Monarchs embark on a 4,000 kilometre journey from the north-east of America to their ancestral wintering grounds in the volcanic mountains of central Mexico. The sight is astounding – a quivering wave of orange descending over the landscape.

For collectors of Modern art and Blackman, this series of butterflies is a miracle. Each work was created for 'A Book of Imaginary Butterflies' and comes with a Certificate of Authenticity from the Charles Blackman Foundation. With only a single impression of most available, we suggest catching a few of these extra special etchings before they flutter away.