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.
Banana Flower with Insects
The book that first showed how a caterpillar becomes a moth.
- Work
- Maria Sibylla Merian, from Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium
- Artist / creator
- Maria Sibylla Merian (German, 1647–1717)
- Origin & date
- Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, 1705
- Held by
- Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (1705)
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 12x16 cleanly.
Size
$24.00
The story
In 1699 Maria Sibylla Merian did something almost unheard of for a woman of her time: at fifty-two she sailed to the Dutch colony of Surinam to study its insects in the wild. The book she brought back changed natural history. Instead of pinned specimens she painted living cycles — here a flowering banana plant hung with the caterpillar, the chrysalis, and the emerged moth all at once, the whole metamorphosis on a single plate, each creature shown on the plant it actually fed on. It was rigorous ecology two centuries before the word existed, and it is exquisite. One of the founders of entomology, and one of its finest artists, in one page.
About this reproduction
- Faithful reproduction of a public-domain work, sourced from Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (1705)’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.
