Maria Sibylla Merian was one of the first naturalists — anywhere, of any gender — to study plants and insects as a single living system rather than separate curiosities, decades before that approach became scientific orthodoxy. This 1693 study pairs a caper branch and flowering gorse with a beetle rendered at the same scale and with the same care, a habit that ran through her whole body of work, culminating in her landmark Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium. What to notice: Merian drew from direct observation, not from dried specimens or secondhand plates — the slight asymmetry of the caper's petals, the particular way gorse thorns crowd a stem, read as the record of a living plant in front of a living hand. It is botanical art doing double duty as entomology, three hundred years before ecology had a name.

Maker: Maria Sibylla Merian
Date: 1693
Medium of the original: Plate
Original held by: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Rights: Public domain, verified
Catalogue number: PA-00244

As chosen: 8 x 12 in, art print, classic frame
Picture	8 x 12 in
Outside size	9.6 x 13.6 in
Depth	0.9 in (22 mm)
Weight	[[REAL PROOF NEEDED: shipped weight per size and frame]]
Hanging	[[REAL PROOF NEEDED: hanging hardware Prodigi fits to this frame]]
Material	Enhanced matte art paper, 200 gsm; acrylic glazing
Made in	Charlotte, North Carolina, by Prodigi

Before a size goes on sale, the file is measured against it: pixels per inch at that size, how much of the picture a crop would lose, tone and sharpness. A size that fails is not offered, so there is nothing to choose wrong.

How the print check works

Sizes offered
Size	dpi	Grade	How it fits
8 x 10 in	163	Good	Trimmed 9.2%
8 x 12 in	150	Good	Trimmed 8.2%

Sizes withheld
Size	Why
11 x 14 in	119 dpi; a historical scan is never enlarged
12 x 16 in	109 dpi; a historical scan is never enlarged
12 x 18 in	100 dpi; a historical scan is never enlarged
16 x 20 in	81 dpi; a historical scan is never enlarged
16 x 24 in	75 dpi; a historical scan is never enlarged
18 x 24 in	72 dpi; a historical scan is never enlarged
20 x 30 in	60 dpi; a historical scan is never enlarged
24 x 30 in	54 dpi; a historical scan is never enlarged
24 x 36 in	50 dpi; a historical scan is never enlarged
30 x 40 in	43 dpi; a historical scan is never enlarged
36 x 48 in	36 dpi; a historical scan is never enlarged
40 x 60 in	30 dpi; a historical scan is never enlarged

Scanned

2026-10-07

Master file

1,310 x 1,803 px, srgb

Tone

Darks 166, lights 234 of 255; 0% clipped light, 0% clipped dark

Colour

0% vivid

Sharpness

3.11

Notes

Narrow tonal range (25 L*): prints soft and even, as the original reads
Neutrals lean warm (yellow): the paper and varnish of the original, kept as scanned

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Every piece is printed after you order it, in Charlotte, North Carolina, and ships from there. For now we ship to US addresses only.

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