Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717)

The life and work of the illustrator and entomologist Maria Sibylla Merian spans both art and natural history in a period when a clear divide did not exist between the two disciplines, when women were not encouraged to travel in search of particular subject matter, and when publication—particularly scientific—remained predominantly the preserve of those with a university education. While Merian’s life-size studies of insects and the plants upon which they relied drew considerable recognition during her lifetime, both her scientific approach and the story of her remarkable life and journey to South America have become a focus of interest in women’s studies today.

Born in Frankfurt in 1647, Merian was raised among artists and publishers. Upon the death of her father, the Swiss-born engraver and Frankfurt publisher Matthäus Merian the elder (1593–1650), her mother Johanna Sibylla Heim remarried a painter, Jacob Marrel (1613/1614–1681). A former student of still-life in Utrecht under Jan Davidszoon de Heem (1606–1684?), Marrel taught his step-daughter in his own studio, nurturing her skill in drawing from life, as well as in the techniques of water-colour and copper-plate engraving. Although her male contemporaries were expected to travel in search of fresh subject matter, patronage, and commissions, Merian was not. On the return from Italy of one of her step-father’s students, Johann Andreas Graff (1636–1701), she married him, gave birth in 1668 to their first daughter (Johanna Helena), re-located within two years to Nuremberg, where her second daughter (Dorothea Maria) was born, and worked towards her first publication, Neues Blumenbuch, a pattern book of floral designs for embroidery. The first volume of this work appeared in 1675 and was followed in 1678 and 1680 by the second and third volumes, respectively.

In Nuremberg (the home a century-and-a-half earlier of Albrecht Dürer who worked also in water-colour and through the medium of print to study the plants, animals, and insects around him), Merian focussed on metamorphosis in the life-cycle of insects. Here, in an age when insects were little understood and people believed in ‘spontaneous generation’ (i.e. an imagined process whereby organisms were thought to develop from non-living matter, such as from soil or decaying flesh), Merian collected, bred, and studied caterpillars, moths, and butterflies, recording their passage from egg to larva and pupa, and charting their development to their adult stage. The first part of her publication Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandelung und sonderbare Blumen-nahrung (‘The wondrous transformation of caterpillars and their remarkable diet of flowers’) was published in Frankfurt in 1679, with the second part appearing four years later.

The family returned to Frankfurt in 1678, where, following the death of her step-father Marrel, Merian left her husband and, with her young daughters, moved in with her mother. In 1685, she took the household to Friesland to join the Labadist community. This movement had been founded by the French pietist Jean de Labadie (1610–1674). His followers, including the scholar, painter, engraver, and poet Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678), had established a community at Wieuwerd in a castle that belonged to three members of their community, the Aerssen van Sommelsdijck sisters. By 1691, however, Merian’s mother was dead and once again, with her girls, she uprooted herself and settled in Amsterdam. Here, in 1692, her elder daughter, Johanna, married Jakob Hendrik Herolt, a Labadist and merchant who traded in Suriname. The same year, Merian’s husband divorced her.

In 1699, the city of Amsterdam granted permission for the fifty-two-year-old Merian to travel with her younger daughter to the Labadist colony of La Providence in Suriname, which was then (and remained until 1975) a Dutch colony. Financed by the sale of her paintings and Merian’s teaching, the two women set sail for South America on 10 July. Merian intended to study insects, plants, reptiles, and animals, and, upon their arrival the following September, began sketching and collecting the species she encountered, recording vernacular names and their traditional use by the local community. Despite her wish to stay significantly longer, illness forced her to return to Amsterdam in the summer of 1701. On recovering her health, Merian published Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705) and sold engravings of the studies she had made from direct observation. From 1711, her elder daughter Johanna (1668–after 1723) lived in Suriname and shipped back deliveries of specimens which her mother sold.

Merian died in Amsterdam on 13 January 1717, following a stroke she had suffered two years previously. Her younger daughter, Dorothea, oversaw publication of a posthumous collection of her mother’s work, Erucarum Ortus Alimentum et Paradoxa Metamorphosis. Both daughters were talented artists, although, as they worked primarily for their mother, much of their work is likely to have been assigned to her name.