Fi Webster's photos with the keyword: Albertus Seba

Cut-paper collage postcard, 6" x 9", 15.2 cm x 22.9 cm. Background is 19th century ledger paper: if you look in the upper left (& tip your head to the right), you'll see where the bookkeeper has written "Ditto, Ditto..." Snake by Albertus Seba (who else?). Women are angels from a late 13th century altarpiece by Giovanni Cimabue.

Cut-paper collage postcard for Illustration Friday's theme "Survival." Snake by Albertus Seba.

Cut-paper collage (plus acrylic paint) postcard created for Kollage Kit theme: "Leftovers." I love these leftover scraps themes: I could do them for weeks on end before I used up all my scraps. If you could see how totally inundated my work table is with rejects from previous projects, you'd wonder how I ever get anything done. The background, for example, is one I considered using for one of the Andy Warhol's costume party collages: it's a fabric pattern titled "Deconstructed Knit, 2010" designed by Brittany Keats Cerullo. The two-headed African deer is by good ol' Albertus Seba. The hands are from a book on the archives of the National Library of Medicine. The two people are from an old postcard a friend gave me.

Cut-paper collage postcard. Background text is from the entry on "serpents" in an 1880 encyclopedia, printed on handmade Thai paper with banana leaf inclusions. South American guava-tree scene is from an engraving credited to Albertus Seba, although I doubt he did the work himself. Seba was a Dutch pharmacist who set up his business next to the Amsterdam harbor in 1700. He started by asking sailors and ship surgeons to bring exotic plants and animal products he could use for preparing drugs, then got into collecting specimens of snakes, birds, insects, shells and lizards in his house. Apparently Linnaeus visited Seba's collection a couple of times and used it as part of the basis for his famous classification system. My husband is a biologist: he poured over books trying to figure out the species of the bird and snake depicted. He concluded that the bird is probably a hummingbird, but its shape isn't quite right, so it may have been preserved in a faulty way. The snake he couldn't find in any of his snake books, so either it's extinct, or else the colors are fanciful.

A dear friend of mine recently died. He was/is my best friend, in fact—always will be. So I'm in the throes of it. Cut-paper collage postcard. Background is hand-marbled paper from India. Seven-headed hydra by Albertus Seba (1665-1736).

Cut-paper collage postcard. Robed figure from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. Head of figure from a sculpture by François Rude. Snake from Albertus Seba's Das Naturalienkabinett . Four images on left from Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective's Scrapbook. Note added 09/30/18: The scan of this collage is faulty in one area. See the peculiar orange bar up and to the right of the figure's foot? That's the end of a dark block of wood with nails in it, because the figure in Bosch's painting is Jesus carrying the cross while walking on boards of nails, like mortification sandals his foot is slipping off of. The wood plus nails are so dark, they disappear into the black background. I'll see if I can figure out how to enhance that area, but since I mailed out the original as a postcard, it may be a lost cause.