A girl who kept caterpillars
At thirteen, in Frankfurt, Maria Sibylla Merian kept silkworms in a box and watched them spin, pupate and come out as moths. Most people of her day believed that insects were bred from mud and rotting matter. She had seen for herself that they came from eggs, and she drew what she saw.
Merian (1647 to 1717) was an artist and a naturalist at once, which was rare, and a woman who did both in public, which was rarer. She is best known for Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, the book of insects and plants she made after two years in Suriname, and for the caterpillar books that came before it. Every print we sell of her work comes from that Suriname book.
Frankfurt, Nuremberg and the caterpillar books
She was born into a family of publishers and artists. Her father, Matthäus Merian the Elder, was an engraver and publisher of topographical views; he died when she was three. Her mother then married the flower painter Jacob Marrel, who taught the girl to draw, mix paints, paint in watercolour and make prints, alongside his male pupils.
In 1665 she married Johann Andreas Graff, a painter from Nuremberg, and the couple settled there in 1670. She had two daughters, Johanna Helena and Dorothea Maria, and kept raising caterpillars. In 1679 and 1683 she published two volumes of Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandlung und sonderbare Blumennahrung, the caterpillars' wonderful transformation and strange nourishment from flowers: on each plate a caterpillar, its pupa and its moth or butterfly, on the plant it feeds on.
She was not the first to describe metamorphosis; the Dutch painter Johannes Goedaert had published on it in the 1660s. What was new was the picture: the whole life of one species on one page, with its food plant, drawn from her own breeding. Her observation that each kind of caterpillar keeps to its own plant came from the same patient work.
Amsterdam, and the journey to Suriname at 52
In 1685 Merian left her husband and moved with her mother and daughters to a religious community in Friesland. In 1691 she settled in Amsterdam, where she earned her living by painting and sold her work to collectors. In collectors' cabinets she saw butterflies from Suriname, the Dutch colony on the north coast of South America, pinned and dead, and nothing about how they had lived.
In June 1699, aged 52, she sold much of what she owned and sailed for Suriname with her younger daughter, Dorothea Maria. For two years the two women collected and painted along the Suriname River and on treks into the forest and across the savannah, raising caterpillars in the heat and asking the enslaved and native people of the plantations what the plants were used for. Merian wrote some of their answers into her book, and she noted how the colonists treated the people who worked their land.
Illness, probably malaria, forced her home in 1701. She brought back her sketches, pinned butterflies, preserved specimens and live caterpillars, and in 1705 she published Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium in Amsterdam, at her own expense. What the book is and how it was made.
Her last years and her reputation
Merian had a stroke in 1715 and died in Amsterdam on 13 January 1717. Her daughter Dorothea sold the copper plates and the remaining copies to the publisher Joannes Oosterwijk, who brought out a second edition of the Suriname book in 1719, with twelve more plates.
Over her life she recorded and drew the life cycles of about 186 insect species, in an age when women were discouraged from both art and science. Her portrait was printed on a German 500-mark banknote in the 1990s.
Merian's plates today
Our 72 Merian prints follow the second edition of 1719, in the copy held by the Teylers Museum in Haarlem. Each plate is photographed from that copy, proofed against it and printed for us by Re-Art Special Art Productions in Almere, at the size of the original sheet, in an edition of 250, numbered in pencil and with a certificate. Browse them on Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium or start with the artist page.
Four plates to start with
Questions
When did Maria Sibylla Merian live?
From 2 April 1647, in Frankfurt, to 13 January 1717, in Amsterdam. The year 1713 that appears in some sources is a mistake.
What is Maria Sibylla Merian famous for?
For drawing the full life cycle of insects, from egg to caterpillar, pupa and adult, on the plant each species feeds on, and for Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, the book she made after two years in Suriname (1699 to 1701).
Did Merian travel to Suriname alone?
She sailed in 1699 with her younger daughter, Dorothea Maria, who painted alongside her. They came back in 1701 when Merian fell ill.