The famous ‘paper museum’ with illustrations of zoological and botanical species collected by Johannes le Francq van Berkhey (1729–1812), with emphasis on the drawings of insects for volume 4 of Albertus Seba’s <i>Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesauri</i>

Van Berkhey, Reader in Natural History at the University of Leiden in the Dutch Republic, was financially ruined around 1784–85, an event which led to the sale of his books and manuscripts and his natural history cabinet, which were widely dispersed. He had assembled a famous iconographical collection of over 6,000 drawings and prints of naturalia (many of which he had drawn himself), arranged according to the Linnaean system. These were sold by auction in 1785 as an entity, to an unknown bidder, for the cabinet of King Carlos III of Spain and then preserved in Madrid. This fact has become internationally known only recently.