Insect prints

Maria Sibylla Merian was 52 when she sailed from Amsterdam to Suriname in 1699 with her daughter Dorothea Maria. For two years the two women collected along the Suriname River, bred caterpillars in boxes and painted every stage with the plant it was found on. Her book opens with the pineapple, the fruit she thought the finest in the colony, and goes on through cassava, banana, guava and cotton, each with the insects that live on it. All 72 plates of the 1719 edition are here, from the Harlequin Beetle and the Mantids to the Tarantula & Weaver Ants in a guava tree. What is Merian’s Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium? tells the story of the book.

Edward Donovan’s insects are smaller sheets from almost a century later, and not only butterflies: The Insects of China and The Insects of India include two lantern flies, Fulgora candelaria and Fulgora pyrorhynchus, each set against a flowering plant of its country.