Adalbert Seitz Prints
1860–1938 · German · Entomological illustration
Adalbert Seitz's Macrolepidoptera of the World — exotic butterflies and moths arranged in dense, vivid entomology plates. Restored and printed to order on heavyweight matte paper.
12 prints · printed to order on heavyweight matte paper · framed or unframed
About Adalbert Seitz
Adalbert Seitz was born in Mainz in February 1860, studied medicine from 1880 to 1885 and then zoology at Giessen, and from 1887 travelled the world as a ship's doctor, collecting butterflies in Australia, South America and Asia. The idea for the work that consumed the rest of his life came that year, after a meeting with the Australian entomologist William John Macleay: a single illustrated catalogue of every large butterfly and moth on earth. He directed the Frankfurt Zoo from 1893 to 1908, then devoted himself to Die Gross-Schmetterlinge der Erde, The Macrolepidoptera of the World, published by Alfred Kernen in Stuttgart in German, French and English editions. The first volume, the Palaearctic butterflies, appeared in 1909 with 89 colour plates; four volumes covered the Palaearctic fauna and twelve more the exotic regions, the Americas, Africa, and the Indo-Australian tropics, with dozens of species to a plate, each specimen painted from the collection and printed in chromolithography. Seitz hoped to finish by 1912; publication continued after his death in Darmstadt in March 1938 and stopped, still incomplete, in 1954. The plates crowd butterflies wing to wing in ordered rows, and that density is what makes them hang so well: a sheet of colour that resolves, up close, into a hundred exact portraits.