The print is the point
Anyone can sell the image — it’s public domain. What you’re buying here is the object: how faithfully, and how durably, the masterwork lands on your wall.
- Museum-grade cotton-rag
- Heavyweight archival cotton-rag stock — the same acid-free paper conservators trust — not thin poster stock.
- Archival pigment, 100+ years
- Pigment inks, not dye: rated to hold their colour past a century without fading or shifting.
- Colour-managed to the source
- Each file is profiled to the holding institution’s own scan, so the print reads as the painting does.
- Gallery canvas on solid wood
- Canvas is gallery-wrapped over kiln-dried solid-wood stretcher bars — taut, square, ready to hang.
Sea Anemones
Actiniae — Haeckel’s most riotous plate of colour.
- Work
- Ernst Haeckel, Actiniae, from Kunstformen der Natur
- Artist / creator
- Ernst Haeckel (German, 1834–1919)
- Origin & date
- Kunstformen der Natur, 1899–1904
- Held by
- Kunstformen der Natur (plate 49)
Format
The full-resolution color-managed file — yours to print, study, and keep.
Sized to protect print quality — this scan's resolution supports sizes up to 18x24 cleanly.
Size
$24.00
The story
Of the hundred plates in Art Forms in Nature, this is the one that startles people: sea anemones massed together in magenta, coral, viridian and gold, their tentacles fanned out in perfect radial rosettes like a tray of impossible flowers. Haeckel drew from specimens and from life on his Mediterranean trips, then arranged the page for maximum symmetry — biology composed with the eye of a designer. He believed nature’s underlying order was itself beautiful, and that showing it was an argument. Architects and jewellers of the 1900s pored over these pages; you can trace Art Nouveau’s whole vocabulary back to them.
About this reproduction
- Faithful reproduction of a public-domain work, sourced from Kunstformen der Natur (plate 49)’s open-access release.
- Printed to order on archival cotton-rag stock, pigment inks rated 100+ years.
- Color-managed to the source scan.
- Every factual claim about this work — title, artist, date, and holding institution — is verified against the art-historical record and the source institution.
- Ships in 5–8 business days; satisfaction guaranteed.
