Little is known about the mathematician Nicolaas Struyk’s childhood and education.[1] He was born on May 21, 1686, in Amsterdam as the second son of the goldsmith Nicolaas Struyk Nicolaaszoon and Geertruy Wesdorp. The Struyk family were faithful members of the Lutheran church in Amsterdam. From an early age, Struyk was in contact with collectors of natural history specimens and he himself collected on a modest scale. As a young boy, he would catch butterflies together with his father. By 1718, Struyk had assembled an album with six substantial volumes with drawings. Later in life he was to write that ‘formerly insects were my favorite pastime’. Struyk never married and died in Amsterdam in 1769.

Around 1712, at the age of 26, when Struyk was assembling his drawings of natural history, he started his mathematical work. No longer chasing butterflies, he devoted his time to collecting empirical data, with the aim of discovering lawlike patterns. This development was less strange than it may seem now. The collections of curiosities and natural history specimens in Dutch cabinets of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were a small-scale reflection of the world as a whole. He remained a true collector in his scientific field, focusing on applied mathematics.

Like many mathematicians at that time, he first was concerned with natural science, performing calculations of solar and lunar eclipses. In his Uytreekening der kanssen in het speelen (Calculation of Chances in Gambling) published in 1716, Struyk displayed his interest in probability calculus, building further on the probability theory published by Christaan Huygens in 1657, the earliest known scientific treatment of the subject. After the publication of Inleiding (Introduction) in 1740, Struyk carried on tirelessly. The many references to books and papers in foreign journals show that he read profusely and carried on correspondence with colleagues in many countries. However, since his books were published in Dutch, Struyk did not receive international recognition for his work.

Many of Struyk’s drawings, including Dragonflies, have the same contemporary black and gold ruled beige card mounts, previously referred to as Seba mounts, indicating that they all came from the same album. Three title pages with drawings of insects, now dispersed, dated 1715 and 1719, named N. Strijck as the author, indicating that these sheets originated from different folios. One of the title pages bears the inscription ‘Verschyden, Uyt­lansche Insecten, geteekent na het Cabinet van d'Hn. Seba, J. ten Kate, &c., versamelt door N. Struyck, junior, 1719, suggesting that these drawings were executed after exotic insects in the cabinet of Albertus Seba and others.

Born in East-Frisia, Albertus Seba (1665-1736) moved to Amsterdam, where he opened a pharmacy near the harbour around 1700.[2] Seba delivered drugs to the V.O.C. ships departing to the Far East and asked sailors and ship surgeons to bring back exotic plants and animals used for preparing drugs. Seba also started to collect snakes, birds, insects and shells that he bought from or traded with the sailors. From 1711 he provided drugs to the court in Saint Petersburg. After Seba promoted his collection with the head-physician to the tsar, Robert Arskine, Peter the Great bought the complete collection for 15,000 guilders in 1716. Seven months later seventeen trunks arrived in St. Petersburg. With Seba as an intermediate, the famous botanist Frederik Ruysch sold his collection to the tsar as well. A special building was designed, and from 1728 till 1830, both collections were exhibited in the Kunstkammer in St. Petersburg.

After the sale of his first cabinet, Seba immediately began forming an even more extensive one. He was able to take advantage of Amsterdam's preeminent position in overseas trade to collect exotic specimens and had numerous foreign contacts in Ceylon, Virginia, Arabia, Greenland and elsewhere. He was also a leading figure in the international scientific community, opening his cabinet to scholars and scientists and corresponding with his contemporaries Hans Sloane (1660-1753) and Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778). Seba published his second cabinet beginning in 1734 as Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesauri descriptio. Only two volumes were completed before his death in 1736 and posthumous publication of the final two volumes was funded by the sale of the cabinet at auction in 1752.

While the second cabinet is documented in the Thesaurus and some specimens from both cabinets survive in St. Petersburg and Paris, there is no pictorial record of the first Seba cabinet. It could well be possible that Seba commissioned Struyk to draw all the specimen in the collection before shipment took place. Struyk’s drawings may be the sole survivors of a long lost extensive pictorial record of specimens in Seba’s and others’ natural history cabinets.

This drawing with an identical mount was most likely included in the album containing six folios with 271 drawings that once were in Struyk’s possession, consisting of insects and butterflies, seven birds, six shells and fourteen plants, each carefully mounted.[3] The undertaking of such an elaborate project as the creation of these now dispersed albums can only have been done for a wealthy patron interested in science and nature. It would have been a long-term commission, perhaps begun well in advance of the 1719 date on the title page. Since the insects in Struyk’s drawings do not seem to appear in the Thesaurus, they may represent specimens in Seba’s first cabinet before their transport to Russia in 1717.

Nicolaas Struyck

[1] Huib J. Zuidervaart, Early quantification of scientific knowledge: Nicolaas Struyck (1686-1769), as a collector of empirical data, p 127

[2] Zuidervaart, op.cit., p 127, footnote 10 Cf. Smit et al., Hendrik Engel’s Alphabetical List, no. 1485

[3] Hagen, op.cit., p. 394: ‘véritable chef d’oeuvre fait par un vrai artiste et exécuté d’un main de maître’.