Insects

This drawing comes from the Age of Enlightenment, a period of heightened scientific study of the natural world. In his youth, Dutch mathematician Nicolaas Struyk took great interest in insects. He collected them on outings with his father, and he had access to formidable collections that we were being assembled in his hometown, the international trading city of Amsterdam. One of the greatest collections belonged to Albertus Seba, a pharmacist who provided medicines to voyagers heading to Indonesia and other far-away places. Attempting to discover materials with pharmaceutical potential, Seba acquired natural history specimens from the sailors who returned. He eventually built an enormous collection that he sold to Russian tsar Peter the Great. Struyk made beautiful illustrations of Seba’s specimens and similar material from other collections, compiling six volumes of drawings by 1719. These marvelous insects may well have come from Indonesia, where the locals would eat them.