Aitchison painted Butterflies in a Landscape shortly after his return from Italy in 1955. Writing some decades later, the artist’s friend John McEwen explained that the visit to Italy produced in Aitchison ‘the realisation that raw umber and dark colours could be just as ‘glamorous’ as bright ones.’ This painting is composed with horizontally arranged bands of colour, each band constructed from a finely graded haze of dabbed brushstrokes – a notable difference to his later work, in which the thin unbrushed surface became paramount. The off-black butterflies fluttering against the haze of red and the darkened foreground indicate the artist’s early comprehension of how to activate colour in a picture, contrasting it and making it shimmer. The painting was exhibited in Three Romantic Painters in 1956 at Gallery One, an enterprise founded by Victor Musgrave in 1953 which later presented solo exhibitions of work by F.N. Souza and Bridget Riley among others. The ‘Romantic’ epithet was more than mere convenience in Aitchison’s case, and early works such as this display characteristics of what the artist John Piper called ‘Modern Romance’. Writing in 1942, Piper placed J.A.M. Whistler in this category because of his ‘concentration on a single object, or a few carefully disposed objects, in a picture with an all-pervading mood.’ The same sentiment can be associated with Butterflies in a Landscape, in which any thought of a past or a future is lost to the immediacy of the moment – the natural sway of butterflies on a breeze. Elemental and unmediated, Aitchison’s response to nature exhibits the tropes of a Romantic sensibility. The landscape referred to in the title is notably unspecific. In contrast to Landscape from Inside a Cathedral, for example, painted a year after Butterflies in a Landscape, there is an absence of place-specific reference. The landscape is rather a remembered one, inflected with recollections of the recent months spent in Italy. The cindering, scorched earth recedes to a level horizon, which palls and grows purple. The scene is witnessed under a scowling and overcast sky. Though Aitchison was here experimenting with a nascent language of Colour Field painting, it is rather the Romantic values of sensation and Naturwunder which make Butterflies in a Landscape a masterly work – the earliest of Aitchison’s canonical artistic achievements.