Dorothea Maria Graff was an 18th-century painter from Germany, who lived and worked in Amsterdam, and Saint St. Petersburg.
Background
According to the RKD she was born in Nuremberg as the daughter of the painters Maria Sibylla Merian and Johann Andreas Graff, and learned to paint from them and her sister Johanna Helena Herolt who was ten years older. In 1681 her mother returned to Frankfurt without her father, in order to live with her mother after her stepfather Jacob Marrel"s death. Though Johann Graff joined his family later, in 1686 Merian left her husband and moved with her two daughters and her mother to a religious community of Labadists in Wieuwerd, Friesland.
Career
Johann Graff made various attempts at reconciliation but eventually returned to Germany. In 1691 the four women moved to Amsterdam, where they set up a studio painting flowers and botanical subjects, continuing Merian"s work on "The Caterpillar Book". In 1699 Dorothea accompanied her mother to Surinam and they returned in September 1701.
Dorothea moved in with her mother where they ran a business selling her mother"s prints and paintings.
The couple had a child who died young. In 1714 mother Maria had a stroke that partially paralysed her and Johanna returned for a visit from Surinam, painting under her mother"s name and working on volume three.
In 1717, after her mother died in January, Dorothea published the third volume of her mother"s Der Rupsen Begin. Works by the house of Merian were purchased by Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, Pieter Teyler van der Hulst, and Robert Areskin.
Pieter the Great asked the Gsell-Merian couple to come work for him, and they did, first selling all of mother Maria"s work that they could.
In 1736 she returned to Amsterdam to purchase works by her mother for the collection. She died in Saint St. Petersburg.