Nicolaas Struyck was born on 21 May 1686 in Amsterdam as the son of a goldsmith and faithful member of the Lutheran church. As a little boy he went out with his father catching butterflies. Soon Struyck was in contact with collectors of natural history specimens and assembled himself a modest collection. By 1718, Struyck had produced six substantial folios with insect drawings. Later in life he was to write that “formerly, insects were my favorite pastime”. At some point, Struyck’s love of natural history morphed into a passion for mathematics. In the field of mathematic he remained a collector: instead of chasing butterflies, he collected empirical data with the aim to discover lawlike patterns. The curiosities and natural history specimens in Dutch collector’s cabinets of the late seventeenth century were after all perceived as a small-scale reflection of the world. Struyck never married and died in Amsterdam in 1769.

One title page, dated 1719, notes that the drawings were made after specimens from the cabinets of Albertus Seba, and others. Around 1700, Seba, a pharmacist in Amsterdam, supplied drugs to the V.O.C. and built an extraordinary collection of exotic plants and animals. In 1716, Tsar Peter the Great purchased Seba’s first cabinet for 15,000 guilders, shipping it to Saint Petersburg to display in his Kunstkammer. After the sale, Seba immediately began assembling a second, even larger cabinet, sourcing specimens globally and documented in the Thesaurus. However, no pictorial record exists of the first cabinet, and it is possible Struyck recorded the specimens before they were shipped. Struyck’s drawings—likely part of six folios containing 271 mounted works—may thus preserve the only visual record of Seba’s lost first collection, a major scientific endeavor likely commissioned by a wealthy patron.