Seba, Albertus

Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesauri accurata descriptio, et iconibus artificiosissimis expressio, per universam physices historiam. Amsterdam: J. Wetsten, William Smith, and Jansson Waesberg (volumes 1–2); Jansson Waesberg (volume 3); H. C. Arkestee, H. Merkus, and Peter Schouten (volume 4), 1734–1735; 1759; 1765



4 volumes, folio (20 x 13 1/4 in.; 508 x 337 mm). Dutch-Latin issue, half titles in Dutch, 4 Latin title-pages printed in red and black with engraved vignette by P. Tanjé after L. F. Dubourg, engraved frontispiece in vol. 1 by P. Tanjé after Dubourg, engraved portrait of Seba by J. Houbraken after J.M. Quinkhard, 5 engraved headpieces by Tanjé, 449 engraved plates (of which 175 are double-page) by Tanjé, A. van der Laan, F. de Bakker, A. van Buysen, de la Croix, J. Folkema, W, Jongman, F. Morellon, K. D. Pütter, J. Punt, and J. van der Speyk; light chiefly marginal spotting, some light browning, occasional faint offsetting of plates and text.  Contemporary mottled calf, the spines in 9 compartments gilt (2 reserved for red and green morocco lettering and numbering pieces), edges sprinkled red, plain endpapers; extremities restored,a few scrapes to boards of vols. 3–4 edges of endpapers stained from leather dressing. 

National Museum of Wales (ex-libris of J. R. le Tomlin) — The Arcadian Library

Copenhagen/Anker 454; Landwehr 179; McGill/Wood p. 560; Nissen BBI 1825; Nissen ZBI 3793; Plesch 862; Pritzel 8562

First edition, an attractive copy with wide margins of the most complete record of any eighteenth-century cabinet of natural history. Albertus Seba was an apothecary in Amsterdam who became wealthy in the service of the Dutch East India Company. During this time, the Dutch, through the Company, commanded the most extensive network of trade and colonies in the world, and it was by exploiting this that Seba managed to build his enormous wunderkammer. He gathered a vast array of specimens from Sri Lanka, Greenland, Indonesia, and other far-flung places. Many specimens were from South America, which came via the Dutch colony of Surinam.

His first collection had been sold in 1717 to Peter the Great of Russia for the princely sum of 15,000 guilders. However, his second collection soon surpassed the first in depth as well as in breadth. The present work is a catalogue of his second and greatest cabinet of natural rarities and curiosities which included mammals, birds, plants, insects, butterflies, reptiles, amphibians, fish, crustaceans, shells, minerals, and fossils, as well as monsters and freaks of nature such as the seven-headed hydra (which Linnaeus denounced as a fake).  Most of the text of the first two volumes was written by Seba himself.

Such was the magnitude of Seba's collection that his private museum became internationally famous as a tourist attraction, visited both by passing dignitaries and naturalists. One of the latter was Maria Sybilla Merian, who made use of the cabinet in her great work on Surinamese insects (see lot 164). Seba's cabinet also played a significant role in Linnaeus's classification of the natural world.

Seba died in 1736 with the last two volumes still awaiting publication. The collection was auctioned in 1752 to finance completion of the catalogue. Many of Seba's specimens still survive in European museums. "No other work at the beginning of the eighteenth century offered such a comprehensive survey of the diversity of living things as Seba's thesaurus" (Willman and Rust, in the Taschen reprint of Seba's work, 2001).