A book that opens with a pineapple
The first two plates show a pineapple, first in flower and then ripe, with the caterpillars and butterflies that live on it. Merian put it at the front because, she wrote, it was the most important of all edible fruits. Then come the cassava, the banana, the guava and the cotton plant, each with its insects, and later a caiman, a snake, a toad and a tarantula among ants. Nothing like it had been printed before.
Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, the transformation of the insects of Suriname, was published in Amsterdam in 1705 by Merian herself, in Latin and in Dutch, with 60 plates engraved on copper and sold coloured or uncoloured. A second edition of 1719 added twelve plates, and it is that edition of 72 plates that our prints follow. The book is the result of a journey she made at 52; her life is told separately.
Two years on the Suriname River, 1699 to 1701
Merian sailed from Amsterdam in June 1699 with her younger daughter Dorothea Maria, and the two women worked for two years on the plantations along the Suriname River and on treks through forest, swamp and savannah. They collected caterpillars, bred them in boxes until the adult came out, and painted every stage on vellum, with the plant each one was found on.
The heat and the fevers wore her down. In 1701 she was ill enough to sail home, taking her sketches, pinned butterflies, specimens in brandy and a few live caterpillars with her.
From watercolour to copper plate
Back in Amsterdam, Merian worked up her studies into finished watercolours and had them engraved on copper by professional engravers. The prints were then coloured by hand, some by Merian and her daughters, and some copies were made as counterproofs, a technique that softens the engraved line until the result is hard to tell from a watercolour.
Every plate follows the rule of her caterpillar books: the plant, the caterpillar, the pupa and the adult together, so that the reader sees the whole life of the insect at once. Merian was working fast in a country she did not know, and she made mistakes: on some plates the butterfly does not belong to the caterpillar below it, or the plant is not the one the species feeds on. Scholars have been sorting out which is which ever since.
Her preface, addressed to the reader, explains why she went and how she worked; the text beside each plate gives the local names of the plants, their uses, and what she saw the insects do.
The second edition of 1719
Merian died in January 1717. Her daughter Dorothea sold the copper plates and the stock to the Amsterdam publisher Joannes Oosterwijk, who brought out a second edition in 1719. He added twelve plates, among them the caiman, the lizards and the frogs, some of them made from information supplied by the Amsterdam collector Albertus Seba, so that the book grew from 60 plates to 72.
The plates from the Teylers copy
The Teylers Museum in Haarlem holds a coloured copy of the second edition, and our Merian prints are made from it. Each plate is photographed from the original, retouched only where time has left a mark, proofed against the original under daylight and printed for us by Re-Art Special Art Productions in Almere, at the size of the original sheet. The edition is 250 of each plate, numbered in pencil, embossed with our blind stamp and with a certificate of authenticity; prints ship unframed, rolled in a tube.
All 72 plates are on Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, and the whole book can be ordered as a complete set in a Solander box.
Four plates to start with
Questions
How many plates are in Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium?
60 in the first edition of 1705, published by Merian herself, and 72 in the second edition of 1719, published by Joannes Oosterwijk after her death. Our prints follow the 1719 edition.
When was Merian in Suriname?
From 1699 to 1701, with her daughter Dorothea Maria. Illness forced her to return to Amsterdam after two years instead of the longer stay she had planned.
Which copy are the Heritage Prints facsimiles made from?
A hand-coloured copy of the second edition of 1719 in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, photographed plate by plate for us by Re-Art Special Art Productions.