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MERIAN, Maria Sibylla (born Frankfurt am Main, 2 April 1647 – died Amsterdam, 13 January 1717), painter of insects and flowers, and natural scientist. Daughter of Matthäus Merian the Elder (1593-1650), artist and publisher, and Johanna Sibylla Heim (died 1690). Maria Sibylla Merian married Johann Andreas Graff (1637-1701), painter, draughtsman and engraver, on 16 May 1665 in Frankfurt. The couple had 2 daughters. They were divorced in 1692.
Maria Sibylla Merian grew up in an artistic milieu, living at first in Frankfurt am Main, the city where her father, Matthäus Merian the Elder, had a reputable publishing house. Maria Sibylla was three when her father died in 1650; the following year her mother married the flower painter and art dealer Jacob Marrel (1614-1681). In Marrel’s studio Maria Sibylla learned the rudiments of drawing and painting. Both Marrel and a pupil of his, the still-life painter Abraham Mignon (1640-1679), are named as her teachers. Maria Sibylla occupied herself mainly with drawing and painting flowers and insects. In the preface to her Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, she wrote that in her youth she mainly practised painting herbs, flowers and fruit, and that she always tried to embellish them with little creatures she had found. She thus observed at an early age the metamorphoses of worms and caterpillars. At first she focused her attention on silk worms, but later she discovered that other caterpillars turned into much more beautiful butterflies and moths. This discovery led her to collect every caterpillar she could find in order to observe and draw their transformation.
Marriage and work
On 16 May 1665, eighteen-year-old Maria Sibylla married the painter and engraver Johann Andreas Graff in Frankfurt. Ten years her senior, Graff was also a former pupil of Marrel. The couple had two daughters: Johanna Helena (1668) and Dorothea Maria (1678). In 1670 the family moved from Frankfurt to Graff’s native city of Nuremberg, where he set up as an independent artist. Merian contributed to the family income by giving lessons in embroidery, drawing and painting to a group described in the literature as a ‘company of ladies’. She also painted flowers on silk cloth and table linen, and traded in pigments and painting materials. It was probably in this period that Merian was commissioned by the Margrave of Baden-Baden – Turkish Louis – to decorate an army tent with birds and flowers (Wettengl, 18). A three-volume book on flowers, Florum Fasciculi tres – known as the Neues Blumenbuch (New Flower Book) published in 1675, 1677 and 1680 – also dates from her time in Nuremberg. Each volume comprised twelve plates illustrating flowers and garlands to be used as embroidery patterns.
Maria Sibylla Merian continued to focus on collecting, observing and painting insects and butterflies; she even bred them herself, so that she could document the various stages of development. This research resulted in Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandlung und sonderbare Blumennahrung (The wonderful metamorphosis of caterpillars and the floral nourishment peculiar to them), the first volume of which – containing 50 copperplate engravings – appeared in 1679. The caterpillar book was highly praised. Merian’s work differed in certain respects from that of her contemporaries. She was the first not only to examine and paint every detail of the metamorphosis of butterflies and insects but also to describe and illustrate the host plants. Her work can be considered a synthesis of flower still life and insect painting, in which the conventional roles are reversed: in Merian’s work, the insects are the protagonists, and the plants they feed on play supporting parts. Her works also distinguish themselves from other flower and insect books by virtue of their colour engravings.
After the death in 1681of her stepfather, Jacob Marrel, Merian and her daughters moved to Frankfurt to live with her mother. Graff joined the family later. In the meantime, Merian worked on the second volume of her caterpillar book, which appeared in 1683. This part, too, was illustrated with 50 copperplate engravings, and contained, moreover, a poem by the Nuremberg poet Christoph Arnold.
Wieuwerd, Amsterdam and Surinam
In 1685, Maria Sibylla Merian left with her daughters and mother – but not her husband – to live in the Labadist community of Waltha State in Wieuwerd in Friesland. Her half-brother, Caspar Merian (1627-1686), had joined this religious commune in 1677. After several futile attempts to persuade her to return, Graff went to Nuremberg, where he officially divorced her in 1692. He died there in 1701. At Waltha State, Merian was able to carry on her work only to a limited extent. From 1688 to 1691 she worked on what would later be called the ‘herbal series’. Also dating from this period is the Studieboek (Study Book), Merian’s working journal, which provides insight into her working method as well as important biographical information. It must have been at this time that she first saw insects from Surinam, which had been brought to the Netherlands by fellow Labadists returning from their settlement, Providentia.
In the summer of 1691, Merian and her daughters (her mother had died in 1690) left the Labadist community – which by now was disintegrating, owing to internal strife – and moved to Amsterdam, where she set up a business in pigments and mounted and prepared insect specimens. Merian was commissioned by Agnes Block (1629-1704) to make a number of botanical watercolours. Meanwhile she continued her research in natural history, now with the assistance of her daughters. As a well-known artist and researcher, Merian came into contact with such collectors as Nicolaas Witsen (1641-1717), burgomaster of Amsterdam and director of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), his nephew Jonas Witsen (1676-1715), secretary and magistrate of Amsterdam, Casparus Commelin (1668-1731), director of the Hortus Botanicus, and the botanist and anatomist Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731). In her Metamorphosis, Merian wrote that, as she had seen for herself, their collections contained a great many insects and butterflies, but failed to link them to their development from caterpillars. She therefore decided to travel to Surinam at her own expense to carry out research. To pay for the journey, she sold her drawings and collection of prepared insects.
In June 1699, Maria Sibylla left for Surinam at the age of 52, in the company of her youngest daughter, Dorothea Maria. They travelled by boat to Providentia, the Labadist settlement now in decline, after which they spent some time in Paramaribo. They collected material for research by undertaking expeditions to the interior and by sending slaves into the jungle to gather insects, fruits and plants, which the two women then cultivated, described and drew. Exhausted by illness and the debilitating heat, Merian and her daughter left on 18 June 1701 – earlier than planned – and returned to the Netherlands, where they arrived on 23 September with trunks full of drawings, prepared insects, butterflies and reptiles.
In the years 1701-1705, Merian was forced by financial straits to make drawings for Georg Everhard Rumphius’s D’Amboinsche rariteitenkamer (The Ambon cabinet of curiosities), the original illustrations of which were largely lost. In the meantime, Merian worked up the notes and drawings she had made in Surinam, and assembled them into her masterpiece, Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium ofte Verandering der Surinaamsche insecten, which appeared in 1705. This bilingual volume consisted of 60 engravings with accompanying texts, depicting not only butterflies, ants and other insects, but also spiders, reptiles and amphibians – all portrayed with the plants they feed on. The Surinam book caused a great sensation and sold extremely well. It was available in various editions: the most handsome and expensive was the counterproof edition, which contained a set of offset images made by running a print, before the ink had dried, through the press against another sheet of damp paper, producing a softer print in reverse with lines that were less black. If the customer desired, Merian and her daughters coloured the prints in.
Merian also produced Dutch translations of her early work from Frankfurt and Nuremberg, ‘as the High German language is not customary in these countries’: in 1713 the first volume of Der rupsen begin, voedsel en wonderbaare veranderingen was published; the second volume followed in 1714. In that same year, Merian was partially paralysed as the result of a stroke. Her daughters probably went on working, producing work under their mother’s name. Merian did not live to see the appearance in March 1717 of the third volume of Der rupsen begin, published by Dorothea Maria. She died on 13 January 1717 at the age of 69, and was buried in the Leiden cemetery.
Reputation
The work of Maria Sibylla Merian was eagerly sought after in her lifetime. As early as 1675 – Merian was then around 28 – she was praised by Joachim von Sandrart in his Teutsche Academie der Edlen Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste (German academy of the noble arts of architecture, sculpture and painting). In 1711 the Frankfurt scholar Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach visited her in Amsterdam and bought a number of her works. On the day she died, the Russian tsar Peter the Great is said to have bought – through the agency of his personal physician, Robert Areskin – a collection of watercolours on parchment and colour copperplate engravings worth 3,000 guilders. On this occasion Areskin bought her Studieboek for himself. Finally, we know from the inventory of the estate of Pieter Teyler (1778) that the walls of his garden house in Haarlem were covered with prints by Merian.
In 1717, the year of Merian’s death, her daughter Dorothea Maria sold all the engravings and texts related to the flower books, the caterpillar books and the Surinam book to the publisher Johannes Oosterwijk, who reprinted them. She also sold work by her mother – more than 30 watercolours – to the Academy of Science in St Petersburg. The estate of Johanna Helena eventually ended up in the British Museum and the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. Nineteen reprints of works by Merian appeared between 1675 and 1771.
Until some time in the eighteenth century, Merian’s work was seen primarily as a valuable contribution to entomology. The Swedish natural scientist Carl von Linné (Carolus Linnaeus) used her illustrations when framing his taxonomical system. Six plants, nine butterflies and two beetles were named after Maria Sibylla Merian (Wettengl, 13). Over the years, however, the scientific value of her work has increasingly been called into question. In 1834, for example, the naturalist Lansdown Guilding stated indignantly in the Magazine of Natural History that Merian’s Surinam book was bristling with mistakes. The illustrations, he said, were worthless and the book had an ‘anthropological air’. In 1854 the German naturalist Hermann Burmeister openly asked whether Merian’s popularity was due to the content of her work or to its showy appearance (Schiebinger, 79). The historian Londa Schiebinger says that Guilding never lost an opportunity to remind his readers that Merian belonged to ‘the fair sex’. Moreover, he accused Merian of painting several types of Ledidoptera so inadequately that Linnaeus named them incorrectly. Linnaeus, of course, was not at all to blame.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the work of Merian underwent a reassessment. Biographical research was undertaken, and ten novels based on her life were subsequently published. Exhibitions devoted to her life and work were held in 1967 in Nuremberg, to mark the 250th anniversary of her death, and in 1997/1998 in Frankfurt and Haarlem, to commemorate the 350th anniversary of her birth. Various works have been republished in facsimile editions. In 1987 a German postage stamp with Merian’s portrait was issued in the series ‘women from German history’, using a rejuvenated likeness made by Merian’s son-in-law Gsell. The same portrait also graced a 500-mark note, issued in 1992 by the Deutsche Bank. There is even a high-speed train named after her. In the eighteenth century, porcelain – Chine de Commande – was produced with patterns designed by Merian. In 2008 the Museum het Rembrandthuis in Amsterdam held an exhibition devoted to this remarkable scientist, artist and businesswoman.
Author: Astrid de Beer
last updated: 05/07/2015