Portrait of Maria Sibylla Merian - an engraving by Jacobus Houbraken.
Merian depicted on a 500 DM banknote.
Portrait of Maria Sibylla Merian - an engraving by Jacobus Houbraken.
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1675
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1705
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artist entomologist illustrator naturalist
Merian was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on April 2, 1647. She was the daughter of Matthäus Merian and Johanna Sibylla Heyne. Matthäus Merian was a famous engraver and publisher. Maria Merian was the ninth child in the family. Her father died in 1650, when she was just three years old, and in 1651 her mother remarried the flower and still life painter Jacob Marrel.
Maria Merian studied painting under the tutelage of Marrel at the family’s Frankfurt home. She was taught in watercolour techniques, since women were not allowed to sell paintings in oils in many German cities. She collected insects and other specimens for Marrel’s compositions, and in these formative years, nature - plants and caterpillars in particular - became Merian’s primary subjects of artistic interest. Maria Sibylla Merian recalled: "I spent my time investigating insects. At the beginning, I started with silk worms in my home town of Frankfurt. I realized that other caterpillars produced beautiful butterflies or moths, and that silkworms did the same. This led me to collect all the caterpillars I could find in order to see how they changed."
Merian's family moved to Nuremberg in 1670, her husband's hometown. They lived there for the next 14 years. She gave drawing lessons to unmarried daughters of wealthy families, which helped her family financially and also increased their social standing. This also provided her with access to the finest gardens, maintained by the wealthy, where she could collect and document insects. During that time Maria Merian also produced a series of watercolour engravings of popular flowers. These illustrations were published between 1675 and 1680 in the three-volume Blumenbuch ("Book of Flowers"), which was later reprinted, with 36 plates and a preface, as Neues Blumenbuch ("New Book of Flowers").
Meanwhile, after her stepfather’s death in 1681, Maria Merian's family returned to Frankfurt to support her mother. In 1685 she travelled with her mother, husband and children to Friesland, the place where her half-brother Caspar Merian had lived since 1677. Starting from 1685 Merian with her daughters and mother settled in Walta Castle at Wieuwerd in Friesland, which belonged to the Labadist community. There Merian found the time to study natural history and Latin, the language in which most of the scientific books were written. Besides, she observed the birth and development of frogs, collecting and dissecting them. Merian was with the community until the year 1691.
In 1691, a year after her mother’s death, Merian and her daughters went to Amsterdam. Maria Merian made a living selling her paintings. She and her daughter Johanna sold flower pictures to art collector Agnes Block. By 1698 they resided in a well-furnished house on Kerkstraat. In 1699 Merian and Dorothea Maria were granted a sail for a projected five-year-long expedition to Suriname, located on the northern coast of South America. In order to finance the mission, the artist sold 255 of her own paintings. This voyage afforded Maria Merian a unique opportunity to explore new species of insects and plants.
Merian and her daughter settled in at Paramaribo and together collected, studied, and composed illustrations of the jungle’s plants, insects, and other animals. Unlike other Dutch naturalists, Merian was not employed by a commercial enterprise or corporation. However, her journey was partly financed by the directors of the Dutch West India Company.
In June 1701 illness forced the artist to return to Amsterdam. In 1705 she published Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname). The work included some 60 engravings illustrating the different stages of development that she had observed in Suriname’s insects. Like her caterpillar book, Metamorphosis depicted the insects on and around their host plants and included text describing each stage of development. The book was one of the first illustrated accounts of the natural history of Suriname.
In the year 1715 the painter suffered a stroke. In spite of the fact that she was partially paralysed she continued her work until her death in 1717. The last years of her life had been devoted to her work, The Wonderful Transformation of Caterpillars and their Singular Plant Nourishment, in a two-volume Dutch edition.
Maria Sibylla Merian was a prominent naturalist as well as nature artist. Her works on insect development and the transformation of insects through the process of metamorphosis contributed to the advancement of entomology in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
Due to the creation and publication of Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname), Merian became the first person to record such detail observations on insect metamorphosis. According to Haley and Steele in 1843 Merian's pictures "have not been surpassed by any works of art of a similar description, by the moderns, to whom her method of arranging and combining her figures may serve as a lesson."
In 1717, Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, bought 300 of her paintings and opened the first art museum in Russia in order to display them. Her portrait was printed on the 500 DM note before Germany converted to the euro. Maria Merian's portrait has also appeared on a 0.40 DM stamp, released on 17 September 1987. Besides, many schools were named after her.
In the late 1980s, Archiv imprint of the Polydor label issued a series of new recordings of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's piano works performed on period instruments and used Merian's floral illustrations for the cover.
In June 2017 a symposium was held in Merian's honour in Amsterdam. In March of the same year, the LLoyd Library and Museum hosted a "Off the Page". It was an exhibit rendering many of Merian's illustrations as 3D sculptures with preserved insects, plants, and also taxidermy specimens.
from Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, Plate XIII. (Spondias purpurea)
from Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium
from Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, Plate XLVIII
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Musa paradisiaca
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Plate of a moth (Eumorpha labruscae) that feeds on grape (Vitis vinifera)
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Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium
Granatapfel
Plate #23- Musa paradisiaca, Caligo teucer and Cnemidophorus lemniscatus
from Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, Plate XX. (Thysania agrippina)
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Rote Lilie
A Parrot Tulip, Auriculas, and Red Currants, with a Magpie Moth, its Caterpillar and Pupa
Metamorphosis of a Butterfly
Plate LXXXV, from Erucarum Ortus Alimentum et Paradoxa Metamorphosis (1679-1717)
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from Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, Plate XLV
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Spectacled Caiman (Caiman crocodilus) and a False Coral Snake (Anilius scytale)
Wasserskorpion, Frösche, Kaulquappen und Wasserhyazinthe
Spiders, ants and hummingbird on a branch of a guava
Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname), figure 46
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from Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandlung und sonderbare Blumennahrung, Plate CLXIX
Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensiam
Plate showing stages of Cocytius antaeus, from Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium
Pineapple and cockroaches
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Inflorescence of Banana
Maria Merian was a highly religious woman, that was apparent from her publications. The religious community Merian joined was named after Jean de Labadie, the Labadists; he was a former Jesuit. The main idea of his ideology was an attempt to live like the first Christians: devout, sober and communal, with all income shared between its members.
Her fascination - as a deeply religious woman - for caterpillars and butterflies can be explained in part by metamorphosis as a metaphor: the caterpillar resembles man on earth, the pupa represents its apparent death, and the butterfly is the soul that returns to God.
Quotations: "Art and nature shall always be wrestling until they eventually conquer one another so that the victory is the same stroke and line: that which is conquered, conquers at the same time."
She was a great observer. She described what she saw and was able to capture her observations in increasingly beautiful compositions.
In 1665 Maria Merian married Jacob Marrell's apprentice, Johann Andreas Graff. His father was a poet and also a director of the local high school, which was one of the leading schools in 17th-century Germany. Their first daughter, Johanna Helena, was born in 1668. Her second daughter, Dorothea Maria, was born in 1678. In the year 1685, Maria Merian left her husband, taking the daughters and settling in the Labadist community. In 1692 they eventually divorced. Both of her daughters became painters, just like their mother.
