Belle, a painted butterfly, has been quietly hovering over a beautiful white poppy in a seventeenth-century Dutch painting that hangs in the National Gallery of Art. Magically dislodged as her painting is being moved by museum staff, Belle and fellow butterfly Brimstone lose track of the cart carrying their painting and so are on their own to find their way back home. Because they are made of paint, they discover that they can blend into any of the other paintings in the museum, which they must do to avoid becoming a meal for the painted bird in hot pursuit.

Mary Lee Corlett is an art historian and a research associate at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. She lives with her husband and daughter in Falls Church, VA