Adolphe Millot Papillons exotic butterflies print - smaller size

Adolphe Millot’s Papillons Exotiques – The Butterflies of South-East Asia

October 31, 2018 Mike Comments 1 comment

If you’re a regular haunter of museum gift shops (not an outrageous assumption if you’re reading this blog), you’ve probably seen this design before. Several dozen brightly coloured butterflies and moths, adorning teatowels, wall prints and postcards in a quaint Belle Epoque style.

But who created this delightful piece of antique scientific illustration? Little is known about Adolphe Millot (1857-1921), the Parisian dessinateur responsible for this and many other plates depicting a wide variety of animals and plants, both European and exotic.

In addition to being an accomplished painter and lithographer, Millot was evidently a keen natural historian. He was a member of the Société des Artistes Francaise and the Société Entomologique de France. Most importantly for our purposes, he was also the Senior Illustrator at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, the national natural history museum of France that boasts among its chairs such luminaries as Baron Georges Cuvier and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

During his illustrious career, Millot also provided illustrations for several encyclopaedias and illustrated dictionaries published by Editions Larousse. Two full-size plates featuring colour illustrations of butterflies and moths appeared in the 1898 edition of Nouveau Larousse Illustré. In addition to the plate of exotic Lepidoptera covered in this article, there was also one with European species. It’s unclear whether Millot’s natural history plates for the Editions Larousse publications were entirely new commissions, or based upon previous work done at the museum or for other institutions. It seems likely that many of them would be based upon specimens from the museum’s collections.

Other natural-history-themed plates in Nouveau Larousse Illustré included other insects, mammals, flowers, and deep-sea life. A third butterfly plate, featuring species from both the European and exotic plates as well as some unique additions, appeared in a sister publication, Larousse Pour Tous. Many of the plates were reprinted in several different Editions Larousse publications.

The plate features 31 butterflies from Asia, Central & South America, and Africa. Nine of these are found in this blog’s area of interest, and the rest of this article will focus on these species. In my research for this article, I identified to the best of my ability the modern scientific names for all 31 species. This was no mean feat, as the key at the bottom of the plate shows century-old French names that required some detective work. At the end of the article I have provided a link to my findings, laid out in a spreadsheet. If anyone would like to pick up the slack and continue with an article on the butterflies and moths from other regions, please be my guest!

The Butterflies

Trogonoptera brookiana (Rajah Brooke’s Birdwing)

Family: Papilionidae

Discovered by pioneering naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace and named after his friend the Rajah James Brooke of Sarawak, this highly distinctive birdwing is Malaysia’s national butterfly.

The specimen shown in the print is likely a male, as females, although displaying a similar patterning, have white flashes on the forewings. The butterfly was discovered in 1855, and for the next hundred years or so it was thought that the female was much rarer than the male, at a ratio of a thousand to one. Articles published in 1950s volumes of the Malayan Nature Journal still referred to this as the likely ratio. It is now known that the apparent discrepancy is caused by different behaviour between the sexes.

Rajah Brooke's Birdwing butterfly from Insects Abroad — Engraving from “Insects Abroad” by J. G. Wood

Females tend to be found at higher levels in the tree canopies, leading to them being encountered much less often by human observers. Juvenile males need to gather mineral ions in order to provide nutrients to the female during mating, a process which aids egg development. They are often seen congregating around puddles, streams and salt licks, and are also reportedly attracted to human sweat and even urine.

Rajah Brooke's Birdwing butterfly Player's cigarette card — A Player’s Cigarettes card from the 1930s

“This beautiful creature has very long and pointed wings, almost resembling a sphinx moth in shape. It is deep velvety black, with a curved band of spots of a brilliant metallic-green colour extending across the wings from tip to tip, each spot being shaped exactly like a small triangular feather, and having very much the effect of a row of the wing coverts of the Mexican trogon laid upon black velvet.

The only other marks are a broad neck-collar of vivid crimson, and a few delicate white touches on the outer margins of the hind wings. This species, which was then quite new and which I named after Sir James Brooke, was very rare. It was seen occasionally flying swiftly in the clearings, and now and then settling for an instant at puddles and muddy places, so that I only succeeded in capturing two or three specimens. In some other parts of the country I was assured it was abundant, and a good many specimens have been sent to England; but as yet all have been males, and we are quite unable to conjecture what the female may be like, owing to the extreme isolation of the species, and its want of close affinity to any other known insect.”

-Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, first published in 1869. Ornithoptera brookiana, as it was then known, was first described in 1855 in the Proceedings of the Entomological society of London.

Trogonoptera brookiana has over ten subspecies, all of which are restricted for international export by license.

Rajah Brooke's birdwings males — Gathering of male Rajah Brooke’s birdwings

Female Rajah Brooke's Birdwing — A female Rajah Brooke’s Birdwing

Ornithoptera priamus (Common green birdwing)

Family: Papilionidae

Also known as the Cape York birdwing, Priam’s birdwing (after the King of Troy during the Trojan War) or northern birdwing, this butterfly is found in New Guinea, Northern Australia and some neighbouring islands. The specimen depicted here is a male – the females are less vividly coloured. Both males and females have a lot of colour variations, and Ornithoptera priamus has almost a hundred different recorded subspecies.

Many subspecies are under threat, and like many birdwings Ornithoptera priamus is highly protected.

Losaria coon (Common clubtail)

Family: Papilionidae

The common clubtail is found in parts of India, and throughout South-East Asia, although curiously absent from Borneo. It is a forest-dweller found in both plains and hills. Wallace mentions encountering the “elegantly-formed” butterfly “fluttering slowly along the shady pathways” in Java.

Engraving of Papilio coon from “Insects Abroad” by J. G. Wood

Although the males and females have similar colouring, the species depicted in the plate is probably a male as females have broader, more rounded forewings.

Graphium anthedon (Milon’s Swallowtail)

Family: Papilionidae

Milon’s Swallowtail has a complicated taxonomic history and has been treated as a subspecies of various other species (such as Graphium sarpedon, the common bluebottle) and undergone many name changes over the last 150-odd years. Wallace named it as Papilio miletus, continuing the Linnaean tradition of classical Greek-inspired nomenclature for the swallowtails. He mentions swarms of them gathering in the “damp places” of the forests of Celebes. It is found throughout the Sunda Islands.

Hebomoia leucippe

Family: Pieridae

Found in the Moluccas and Peleng. Mentioned by Wallace as the largest of the Danaidae.

Delias eucharis (Common Jezebel)

Family: Pieridae

Found throughout South and Southeast Asia. The caterpillars have been suggested as a possible biological agent to control giant mistletoe, which parasitizes fruit trees such as mango.

Junonia orithya (Blue pansy)

Family: Nymphalidae

Found in Africa and Australia as well as throughout Asia, the blue pansy is one of the only Nymphalidae with such a long-established and wide-ranging distribution. It is often found in open areas such as roadsides and gardens, and exhibits territorial behaviour.

Males and females differ in colour and in the size of the spots on the hindwings. The specimen represented on the print is male.

Junonia orithya male — Male Junonia orithya

Junonia orithya female — Female Junonia orithya

Heliophorus epicles (Purple Sapphire)

Family: Lycaenidae

The Purple Sapphire is commonly found in forested areas at higher elevations such as Fraser’s Hill in Malaysia and the Himalayas. Little is known about its life cycle.

Cigaritis syama (Club silverline)

Family: Lycaenidae

There are a number of species that look like the butterfly on the print, and I couldn’t find a definite mapping between the old name and any current scientific name, so it’s possible I am wrong about the ID of this one. The club silverline is found throughout Southeast Asia.

Want your own copy of this print? They occasionally come up for sale on eBay France for decent prices, and do look very nice when framed. I have seen two different versions from different encyclopaedia editions – personally I prefer the older one as the colours seem to “pop” more on the older paper rather than the newer more glossy stock.

The print has been incorporated into a number of creations on Etsy, Redbubble and the like – a search for “Adolphe Millot” and/or “butterflies” should yield plenty of results.

This set of labels and stickers features a sticker of a small section of the print centred on the Rajah Brooke’s birdwing – perfect for laptops, journal covers and the like. The set includes two of them, as well as a wide variety of other vintage natural history themes.

For those who would like to use my research, here is a spreadsheet, ordered by key number and listing the French text, current scientific name, common names, family and region.

Here is a large-sized scan of the print (about 10 megabytes in size)

Found an error in my identification? Enjoyed the piece and want to see more like it? Leave a comment to let me know!

References:

A Naturalist’s Guide to the Butterflies of Peninsular Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, Laurence G. Kirton

Butterflies of Malaysian Borneo – A Pocket Guide, Fatimah Abang

Butterflies of West Malaysia and Singapore (2nd edition), W. A. Fleming

Common Malayan Butterflies (Malayan Nature Handbooks), R. Morrell

Insects Abroad, J. G Wood

Malaysian Butterflies – an Introduction, Yong Hoi-Sen

The Annotated Malay Archipelago, Alfred Russel Wallace (edited by John van Wyhe)

The Butterflies of the Malay Peninsula (2nd edition), A. Steven Corbet and H. M. Pendlebury

Image credits: