<http://purl.org/dc/terms/description>
"A unique collection of French ornament prints entitled Essai de papillonneries humaines\nwas executed by the royal embroiderer of King Louis XV, Charles-Germain de Saint-Aubin in\nthe mid-eighteenth century (c. 1748-1756). Intended as design models for transfer onto a wide\nrange of decorative art objects, the etchings depict witty vignettes of anthropomorphized\nbutterflies performing activities exclusive to the elite classes. Through a consideration of the\ndesigns\u2019 material translations and subsequent social and spatial contexts, my thesis explores the\ninterrelated issues of class relations, intellectual history, salon practices, the culture of\nappearances, and various forms of ornamentation, especially of domestic interiors. Indeed, an\nunprecedented fervor for butterflies in the decoration of new private spaces emerged in the\neighteenth century, coinciding with a fashion for entomology (the study of insects) in the cultural\nand intellectual projects of the period known as the Enlightenment. Drawing from changing\nconcepts on the relationship between humans and insects expressed in entomological,\nphilosophical, and literary natural history publications of the mid-century, I examine the ways in\nwhich insects were increasingly referenced as a source of metaphor for the social, political, and\nindividual self as the century progressed. I suggest that there was a cultural language of\nentomology, one that would have been particularly familiar to the educated nobility and newly\nwealthy bourgeoisie and drawn upon in the practices of salon sociability. Butterflies were the\nhost of an array of specific associations that would have been activated by the intellectual\nconversation and games of wit practiced in salon spaces. As such, through the example of the\npapillonneries designs, my project endeavors to intervene in the discourse of ornament, positing\nthat ornamentation was a dynamic social actor, rather than mere decoration in eighteenth-century\nFrance."@en
<https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0072988>