On Insects and Art

Intersections

Judy Freeman, Curriculum Connections -- School Library Journal, 8/14/2008

I found a little beetle, so that beetle was his name,

And I called him Alexander and he answered just the same.

I put him in a matchbox, and I kept him all the day. . .

And Nanny let my beetle out

Yes, Nanny let my beetle out

She went and let my beetle out-

And beetle ran away.

–A.A. Milne

I pretty much knew that A. A. Milne poem from Now We Are Six (Dutton, 1988) by heart when I was six. It’s possible that this very poem is the reason I have always had a soft spot for beetles and other intelligent and talented insects in poetry and prose (though maybe not so much in real life). There was Chester Cricket, newly arrived from the Connecticut countryside, navigating a busy Manhattan subway station in George Selden’s classic novel, The Cricket in Times Square (Farrar, 1960), and Roald Dahl’s oversize insects in James and the Giant Peach (Knopf, 1961).

If you’re lucky enough to locate a copy, there are two additional treasures with six-legged friends, sadly out of print but well worth reading aloud: Shoebag by Mary James (Scholastic, 1996), in which a Boston cockroach awakens one morning to find he has been transformed into a little boy (in a nod to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, without the malice), inspiring true cockroach empathy; and William Kotzwinkle’s Trouble in Bugland: A Collection of Inspector Mantis Mysteries (Godine, 1983), five insect mysteries solved with Holmesian deductions and flair.

And now there’s a splendid new novel, Elise Broach’s Masterpiece (Holt, 2008; Gr. 3-6) illustrated by Kelly Murphy, which introduces an adventurous and artistically gifted young fellow from the insect population, a shiny black beetle named Marvin. Marvin lives with his family in a damp corner of the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink in the New York City apartment of the Pompadays, a human family consisting of the quarrelsome Mr. and Mrs. Pompaday and Mrs. Pompaday’s son (from her first marriage to Karl, an abstract painter), James. Because Marvin has taught himself to swim, his parents turn to him to rescue Mrs. Pompaday’s contact lens from the bathroom sink drain. If the Pompadays were to call a plumber, the beetles know their home could be discovered and destroyed.

Meanwhile, Marvin has been observing James from afar, and wants to give the boy a wonderful present for his 11th birthday. When he discovers the open bottle of ink—a gift from James’s father, Karl—on the boy’s desk, Marvin dips both of his front legs into it, and, on a clean sheet of paper, begins to draw an intricate picture of the winter street scene he sees out the window. “It was as if his legs had been waiting all their lives for this ink, this page, this lamp-lit window view. There was no way to describe the feeling. It thrilled Marvin to his very core.”

Marvin’s delicate drawing is a marvel (as are Kelly’s pen-and-ink sketches for the book). James is entranced by his present, especially when Marvin demonstrates how he drew it. It looks much like a pen-and-ink by Renaissance drawing master Albrecht Dürer. Naturally, when Karl sees the picture, he assumes James is the artist. Off they go to see the Old Masters exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with Marvin in tow, hiding safely in James’s jacket pocket.

Not only is this the story of the friendship between a boy and a beetle, it’s an introduction to the work of Dürer and a mystery as well, in which Marvin and James manage to thwart a perfect crime, an art heist at the museum. See Dürer’s works, including his self-portraits, at www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/durer_albrecht.html, where you’ll also find scores of interesting links. You may want to booktalk other art mysteries including Blue Balliet’s Chasing Vermeer (2004), The Wright 3 (2006), and The Calder Game (2008, all Scholastic). Or segue into books involving the Metropolitan Museum of Art, such as E. L. Konigsburg’s Newbery Award classic, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (Atheneum, 1970) and Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief (Hyperion/Miramax, 2005).

Listen to Elise Broach introduce and read from Masterpiece

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