The Banana

Musa

A banana in flower and in fruit, with the life that lives upon it.

Book: Banana Flower and Fruit, from Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium
Artist: Maria Sibylla Merian
Date: 1705
Held by: Wikimedia Commons

Musa

Format

The full-resolution scan, colour-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore, down to the stipple.

Size

$29.00

The story

Maria Sibylla Merian sailed to the jungles of Suriname at fifty-two to study how caterpillars become butterflies — and painted each insect *with the very plant it feeds on*, a way of seeing no one had tried before. Art, science, and daring in a single plate. A founding work of ecology, and ravishing. She financed the voyage herself, by selling her own paintings.

See it on your wall

The garden, brought indoors

The Banana printed large and framed, hung in rooms like yours. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.

About this reproduction

A faithful reproduction of a public-domain plate held by Wikimedia Commons — the work is centuries out of copyright (1705).
Printed to order on archival cotton-rag stock, pigment inks rated 100+ years (inscribed pieces and atelier bouquets are set by hand and printed to order).
Colour-managed to the source scan: the hand-colour is the colourist’s, not ours. We correct nothing and invent nothing.
Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed pieces ship flat-packed).
If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.

Why our plates cost more than a poster: we print from the highest-resolution scans in existence, at sizes where the engraving itself becomes visible — the stipple that makes a petal look soft, the wash of the hand-colourist, the veins of the leaf — on stock made to outlive its owner. A poster reproduces the picture. This reproduces the plate.

From the same collection