Morpho Achilles Butterfly 5" x 6.75" 1991 Insect Print P Sluyter #00

Description: Morpho Achilles Butterfly 5" x 6.75" Small Vintage 1991 Insect Print P Sluyter A colour print, rescued from a disbound book of Butterfly prints from 1991, with unrelated text on the reverse. Original printing date 1726, this is a reprint. Suitable for framing, the image size is approx 5" x 6.75" or 12.8cm x 17.3cm edge to edge plus small white border. This is a vintage print not a modern copy and can show signs of age or previous use commensurate with the age of the print. Please view any scan as they form part of the description. All pictures will be sent bagged and in a board backed envelope for protection in transit. While every care is taken to ensure my scans or photos accurately represent the item offered for sale, due to differences in monitors and internet pages my pictures may not be an exact match in brightness or contrast to the actual item. Text taken from the opposite page. Please note this cannot be supplied with the print due to being on the reverse side of the previous print. Any spelling errors are due to the OCR program used. Morpho achilles MORPHO ACHILLES. Hand coloured engraving by P. Sluyter from an original drawing by M. S. Merian, p1. 7 from Merian's De Metamorphosibus Insectorum Surinamensium &c, 1726. Maria Sibylla Merian was a remarkable woman. Born into an artistic family in Germany and then married to a flower painter, she took an unconventional route to achieve fame on her own account. In 1685, when she was fifty-one, she left her husband, went to the Netherlands and joined a religious sect based in a castle in Friesland. Possibly she saw in that castle, or in the cabinet of a Dutch collector, some of the natural curiosities, such as insects and shells, then being brought to Europe for the first time from tropical countries. Such an experience may have stimulated her to undertake a hazardous voyage with her daughter Dorothea to study, collect and ultimately paint the butterflies and moths of Surinam (now a part of Guyana) in South America. Between 1701 and 1703 mother and daughter made many drawings, another daughter continuing the work later. Returning to the Netherlands Maria prepared for publication what has become the most celebrated of all illustrated books about butterflies and moths. First published in 1705 the De Metamorphosibus Insectorum Surinamensium describes and illustrates the life histories of some of the more flamboyant butterflies and moths of Surinam. It was not the first book to show the transformations of insects from the egg stage to maturity but it was the first to do so in a tropical context and in a grand manner. As a girl Merian had reared silkworms and she became fascinated by their transformations from caterpillars into silken balls and then into moths. She went on to collect other kinds of caterpillars and studied their transformations before Surinam beckoned. Referring to this plate she says that she found two yellow caterpillars one of which soon died; the other changed into a green chrysalis on 20 April and from this she obtained a large and very beautiful butterfly on 26 May.

Price: 2.49 GBP

Location: Dereham

End Time: 2024-03-21T07:34:14.000Z

Shipping Cost: 17.03 GBP