I received as a gift a "Blomsterkalender" ( 2002, Prisma, Stockholm) and was enchanted when I encountered three reproductions of the illustrations by Maria Sybilla Merian, tablets dated from sometime in 1600 (!), following her her expedition to Latin-America ( Surinam) and after her marriage in Holland broke up ( I'm unsure if I understood the very abbreviated information that accompanied the images).

I thought you might like to share these beautiful images executed by a Seventeenth-Century lady.

Her name is mentioned by Robert Michael Pyle ( Between Climb and Cloud, Nabokov among the Lepidopterists) in "Nabokov's Butterflies", The Penguin Press, 2000, on page 37.

Wrote R.M. Pyle: In the attic at Vyra, he discovered "armloads of fantastically attractive volumes," including Maria Sibylla Merian's seventeent-century paintings of Surinamese insects, "Esper's noble Die Schmetterlinge" of 1777, and Adalbert Seitz's compendious Die Gross-Schmetterlinge der Erde, which Nabokov called "a prodigious picture book."

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