a butterfly journey maria sibylla merian

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A Butterfly Journey

Maria Sibylla Merian. Artist and Scientist

By Boris Friedewald

Category: art | arts & entertainment biographies & memoirs.

Jul 16, 2015 | ISBN 9783791381497 | 5-3/4 x 7-1/4 --> | ISBN 9783791381497 --> Buy

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Jul 16, 2015 | ISBN 9783791381497

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About A Butterfly Journey

The amazing story of the life and work of the renowned botanical artist Maria Sibylla Merian is told alongside her beautiful illustrations of butterflies in this charming and elegant book. A woman ahead of her time, Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) was an intrepid explorer, naturalist, scholar, as well as a magnificent artist. This lovely, impeccably designed book tells Merian’s incredible life story alongside colorful reproductions of her engravings and watercolors of the butterflies she encountered during her lifetime in Germany and the Netherlands, and her seminal trip to the Dutch colony of Surinam. The book recounts Merian’s monumental expedition, her work as an advocate for the slave laborers of Surinam, and her important studies of the anatomy and life cycle of the butterfly. Author Boris Friedewald employs Merian’s favorite insect as a metaphor for the artist’s own pioneering evolution from budding entomologist to educator, activist, and artist. A visual treasure as well as a satisfying read, this exquisite volume is the perfect gift for anyone interested in Merian’s amazing life and groundbreaking body of work.

Also by Boris Friedewald

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A Butterfly Journey: Maria Sibylla Merian. Artist and Scientist. Hardcover – Illustrated, 1 July 2015

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 144 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Prestel
• Publication date 1 July 2015
• Dimensions 14.45 x 1.75 x 19.05 cm
• ISBN-10 3791381490
• ISBN-13 978-3791381497
• See all details

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From the back cover, about the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Prestel; Illustrated edition (1 July 2015)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 144 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 3791381490
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-3791381497
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 14.45 x 1.75 x 19.05 cm
• 284 in Landscape Painting
• 1,348 in Plant & Animal Art History & Criticism
• 1,985 in Individual Artist Monographs

About the author

Boris friedewald.

BORIS FRIEDEWALD (born 1969) is an art historian, playwright, and the author of Bauhaus(Prestel). He lives in Berlin.

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Maria Sibylla Merian: pioneering artist of flora and fauna

Maria Sibylla Merian,  'A pineapple surrounded by cockroaches'. Watercolour and bodycolour on vellum, about 1701–5.

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Browse our range of Maria Sibylla Merian prints on the  British Museum Shop .

Discover the life of Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717), a remarkable 17th-century botanical artist.

An unconventional figure, Maria Sibylla Merian is best known for her publication of drawings documenting the natural world of Suriname, which were created with support from her daughters. The strikingly composed pieces are notable for their artistic merit and contribution to natural science and brought her international acclaim. Today, the Museum holds two large volumes of her brightly coloured watercolours illustrating the wildlife she encountered. Explore her life, extraordinary journey across the world, and how her family were integral to her success.

Introduction

Maria Sibylla Merian was a botanical artist of exceptional originality and a respected scholar of the natural sciences. She was also a successful businesswoman who paid little attention to the conventions of her day.

Her fame rests on a remarkable journey from 1699 to 1701 to the Dutch colony of Surinam on the equatorial northeast coast of South America. Made at her own expense, she was accompanied by her younger daughter Dorothea Maria (1678–1743). Today, Suriname is the smallest independent country in South America. It resulted in a magnificent work,  Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium  ('The transformation of the insects of Suriname') published in Amsterdam in 1705, which brought her international acclaim.

The work was a large volume containing 60 engraved plates after Merian's designs. It showed the life cycles of butterflies, moths and insects alongside plants and animals of the region, to which Merian added lively commentaries on diet and habitat. The publication was not only a major contribution to the history of natural science, it was also the first-ever book to be devoted to Suriname.

The British Museum holds two large volumes of brightly coloured and strikingly composed watercolours on vellum (prepared animal skin) made by Maria Sibylla Merian and her daughters Johanna Helena (1668–1723) and Dorothea, whom she trained as assistants to work on her publications.

Maria Sybilla was born in Frankfurt to a dynasty of successful print publishers. She was the daughter of Matthäus Merian the Elder (1593–1650) and his second wife, Johanna Sibylla Heimy, a French-speaking Calvinist. At this time Calvinism – a Protestant branch of Christianity established by Jean Calvin in Switzerland in the early sixteenth century – had spread across northern Europe, England and Scotland. By 1626, Maria's father had taken over a publishing firm established by Theodor de Bry (1528–1598), the grandfather of his first wife Maria Magdalena de Bry.

This family of engravers and topographical artists were originally Calvinist refugees from Antwerp. Once settled in Frankfurt, they achieved international fame through their lavishly illustrated books on Protestant voyages. One such volume was  India Occidentalis , better known as the America series (14 volumes. 1590–1634), which explored the New World. These volumes effectively introduced the customs and habits of Indigenous American tribes to European audiences – some engravings were made after the famous watercolours by John White  (active 1585–1593). They amazed readers with lurid accounts of Spanish conquistadores’ treatment of indigenous people, including torture and murder. A second edition of the work was printed in 1630 by Maria's father, Matthäus Merian. In 1633, Matthäus initiated a series on contemporary events called  Theatrum Europaeum,  followed in 1646 by a major topographical series of central Europe named  Topographia Germaniae . Both these works ran into several volumes and were completed by his heirs. Matthäus died when Maria was three-years-old, but the Frankfurt business continued to flourish under her half-brother  Matthäus Merian the Younger (1621–1687), an artist who specialised in portraits.

Early ambitions

This background of art and business enterprise contributed to Maria Sibylla's ambitions. Obsessed with the origins and development of insects from the age of thirteen, she reared caterpillars for more than fifty years, recording all stages of metamorphosis. Her first-hand knowledge of the subject was an important foundation for the later development of entomology (the study of insects) as a zoological discipline.

After her father’s death, her mother married the flower-painter Jacob Marrell (1614–1681). He stimulated Maria Sibylla’s interest in the natural world and helped her develop a highly pictorial style of drawing in bright colours on vellum. In 1665, she married one of her step-father’s pupils, Johann Graff (1637–1701), and they moved to his native city Nuremberg, where Johanna and Dorothea were born. Here, she published three volumes of a pattern book containing traditional style flower engravings, dating from 1675 to 1680.

Her first scientific book on metamorphosis was called Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandelung und sonderbare Blumennahrung ('The wondrous transformation of caterpillars and their remarkable diet of flowers'). It was published by her husband in Nuremberg in two parts, in 1679 and 1683, each illustrated with fifty engravings of caterpillars, chrysalises, butterflies and moths in their natural habitat; with a third part published posthumously by her daughter, Dorothea, in 1717. Descriptions and engravings were based on Merian's own painstaking observation of the lives of butterflies and moths. 

Leaving Germany

Merian cannot have been happy in Nuremberg. She spent more time in Frankfurt after her mother was widowed in 1681 and separated from her husband in 1685. Both Maria Sibylla and her mother were deeply pious and they moved with Johanna and Dorothea to West Friesland in the Netherlands to join a Labadist community – a Protestant movement named after its French founder Jean de Labadie  (1610–1674) at Schloss Waltha, to which her half-brother Caspar already belonged.      On her mother’s death in 1691, Merian moved with her daughters to Amsterdam, which through the exploits of the Dutch East India Company was at the centre of world trade and the home of numerous scholarly collections. It was here Merian found her true vocation and became associated with influential scientists of the city. They included Dr Nicolaas Witsen (the Burgomaster of Amsterdam) and Frederick Ruysch (a professor of anatomy) who gave her access to their prized collections of specimens. She wrote in the introduction to her Suriname book: 'In Holland I saw with wonderment the beautiful creatures brought back from the East and West Indies'.

Traveling to Suriname

For a short time, the Labadists started a community called  La Providence , which included a sugar plantation in Suriname. This gave Merian the idea of travelling to the country to further her studies in wildlife. Such journeys were only ever undertaken by men connected to the sugar trade and were hazardous at the best of times, let alone for a 52-year-old woman travelling with just her daughter, Dorothea. Arriving by boat across the Atlantic, once there she made repeated expeditions into the 'wilderness' – the tropical interior of the country. She collected specimens, feeding them and making drawings as she waited for them to develop. She found these journeys harsh and it's clear she relied on enslaved people to help her. 'One could find a great many things in the forest if it were passable' she wrote. 'It is so densely overgrown with thistles and thorn bushes that I had to send my slaves ahead with axe in hand to hack an opening for me to proceed even to a certain extent, which nevertheless was very difficult.'  It seems Merian's work was viewed peculiarly by those around her. She was jeered at by the Dutch colonists 'for looking for other things than sugar in the country'. She listed a number of interesting plants such as cherries, vanilla, figs and grapes, which she believed could be usefully cultivated if, as she explained, 'the country was inhabited by a more industrious and less selfish population,' a reference to the Dutch colonists.

She returned to Amsterdam in 1701 with sketches, samples of pressed plants, dried insects, and various amphibious and reptilian specimens including a crocodile preserved in alcohol. She spent her remaining years in Amsterdam focusing on the funding of her Suriname publication, with her own engravings and commentary, and the production of associated versions of her watercolour compositions.

Technique and influence

Merian worked in the studio from sketches made on the spot, which she transformed into detailed compositions in bright colours applied in watercolour and bodycolour on large sheets of vellum. The drawings were deluxe versions for collectors of the designs she made for her large print publications. Published in 1705, Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensis , remains her most famous. It was conceived as a beautiful and desirable book that would appeal, as she explained in her preface, to both 'lovers of art' and 'lovers of insects'. Her popularity is based on her innovation of representing insects in a naturalistic context, instead of in diagrammatic style which was the prevailing fashion. The influence of Merian's work is seen in 18th-century artists  Margaretha Barbara Dietzsch  and Georg Dionysius Ehret . 

Later life and legacy

Merian’s work was greatly admired by natural scientists of the period, including the founder of the British Museum Sir Hans Sloane , who acquired the two large volumes of her drawings for the collection. The purchase of an album containing 60 drawings was negotiated through his associate James Petiver. In 1706, he wrote to Dr John Philip Breyne a botanist in Danzig, that a collection of Merian's 'Butterflies Moths etc.. painted on vellum beyond compare hath cost Dr Sloan on my recommendation about 200 Guinneas'. This considerable sum of money equates to just over £50,000 today demonstrating the respect with which Merian was viewed by her peers and how much her work was sought after.

Poor health towards the end of her life culminated in a stroke in 1715. However, workshop production continued. Johanna, then living in Suriname, sent samples while Dorothea worked on the publication of the third volume of her caterpillar book. This appeared just after Maria's death in Amsterdam in 1717, at the age of 69.   

Maria Sibylla Merian's legacy is that of an intrepid and unconventional figure who forged a successful independent career as an artist. She boldly travelled with her daughter to South America making new discoveries about the natural world, which her artistic gifts, and those of her talented offspring, brought to international attention on their return.

Dorothea and Johanna

Merian's deep personal and working relationships with her daughters were integral to her success. She trained Dorothea and Johanna as assistants to follow in her footsteps and they worked closely on her publications.

House mice, melons and nuts  is one of the very few works signed by Johanna. In 1692, she married Jacob Hendrik Herolt, a merchant who traded with Suriname. They moved to the country in 1711, where her husband became the director of an orphanage in Paramaribo. Johanna died there in 1723. 

Attributed to Dorothea, the drawing  A Spectacled Caiman struggling with a Red Pipe Snake , was published as plate 69 in the posthumous 1719 edition of Suriname Insects (Johannes Oosterwijk, Amsterdam). Merian collected many reptiles while in Suriname and it seems possible Dorothea specialised in drawing them.  Dorothea met her first husband, a surgeon called Philipp Hendriks, while in South America. After his death, she married the Swiss painter Georg Gsell in 1717. Following her mother's death that same year, she published the third volume of Maria Sibylla's work on European caterpillars. She later moved with her husband to St Petersburg, where they worked for Tsar Peter the Great and founded an art school that had its own printing presses and publishing house. Here she was appointed to the Academy of Sciences, to whom she sold thirty of her mother’s watercolours. She died in the city in 1743.

See Maria Sibylla Merian's work

The two volumes of Maria Sibylla Merian's work in the collection are available to view by appointment in the  Prints and Drawings  study room. You can also see all drawings by Maria Sibylla  Merian and her daughters on collection online .

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'pineapple'.

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'Two blue butterflies'

'Caiman wrestling with a snake'

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A Butterfly Journey: Maria Sibylla Merian. Artist and Scientist Hardcover – Illustrated, July 16 2015

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 144 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Prestel
• Publication date July 16 2015
• Dimensions 14.45 x 1.75 x 19.05 cm
• ISBN-10 3791381490
• ISBN-13 978-3791381497
• See all details

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Prestel; Illustrated edition (July 16 2015)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 144 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 3791381490
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-3791381497
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 377 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 14.45 x 1.75 x 19.05 cm

About the author

Boris friedewald.

BORIS FRIEDEWALD (born 1969) is an art historian, playwright, and the author of Bauhaus(Prestel). He lives in Berlin.

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A Butterfly Journey Maria Sibylla Merian – Artist and Scientist

About this book

A woman ahead of her time, Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) was an intrepid explorer, naturalist and scholar, as well as a magnificent artist. This lovely, impeccably designed book tells Merian's incredible life story alongside colourful reproductions of her engravings and watercolours of the butterflies she encountered during her lifetime in Germany and the Netherlands and her seminal trip to the Dutch colony of Surinam. A Butterfly Journey recounts Merian's monumental expedition, her work as an advocate for the slave laborers of Surinam and her important studies of the anatomy and life cycle of the butterfly. Author Boris Friedewald employs Merian's favourite insect as a metaphor for the artist's own pioneering evolution from budding entomologist to educator, activist and artist. A visual treasure as well as a satisfying read, this exquisite volume is the perfect gift for anyone interested in Merian's amazing life and groundbreaking body of work.

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Boris Friedewald is an art historian based in Berlin. His most recent book is Picasso's Animals (Prestel).

Art, Science, and Butterfly Metamorphosis: How a 17th-Century Woman Laid the Foundations of Modern Entomology

By maria popova.

Merian bred her own insects, but after seeing a collection of butterflies from Dutch Guiana, modern-day Surinam, she became fascinated by the life-cycle of butterflies and moths, very poorly understood at the time, and set out to study those living in tropical flora, determined to figure out whether they shared the same egg-and-caterpillar process as those she bred herself. In 1699, Merian and her daughter Dorothea sailed to South America to study insects — a venture unheard of at the time, and the very first expedition of this scale a woman had ever undertaken. It took her six years to classify and evaluate her specimens, but when Merian eventually published her magnum opus, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium , in Dutch and English in 1705, it forever changed the course of entomology. She illustrated the stages of insects she had discovered in 60 stunning copperplate engravings, depicting the butterflies, moths, and caterpillars around the plants she had encountered on her travels. The book became for 17th-century Europeans a window into an unknown wonderland, brimming with equal parts artistic whimsy and scientific significance.

Count on Taschen — makers of lavish tomes on such diverse yet uniformly fascinating subjects as information graphics , jazz history , Grimm illustrations , magic , and menu design — to capture Merian’s enduring legacy in the gorgeous Maria Sibylla Merian: Insects of Surinam ( public library ), reprinting her original engravings in vibrant color, alongside contextualizing commentary by biologist, science book illustrator, and museum director Katharina Schmidt-Loske.

In the fascinating Sex on Six Legs: Lessons on Life, Love, and Language from the Insect World , Marlene Zuk writes of Merian:

Merian documented, many years before the naturalists of the time, the life cycles of butterflies, moths, and other insects. Her work is exquisite from an aesthetic perspective, but what interests me more is that as a woman in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, she was able to make scientific contributions that would have been impossible in virtually any other field, simply by virtue of using the specimens from her own garden. She eventually traveled to Surinam to study the brilliantly colored insects of the steamy jungle, but that was after her interests had been firmly set. Although she, like many other women scientists and naturalists, faced opposition for her unfeminine activities, the accessibility of her subjects meant that she could keep doing the work she loved.

Maria Sibylla Merian: Insects of Surinam is spectacular in its entirety, as artistically impressive as it is scientifically influential, and above all a time-capsule of groundbreaking, gender-norm-defying achievement. Complement it with the similarly stirring story of Genevieve Jones’s egg and nest illustrations .

— Published September 18, 2013 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/09/18/maria-sibylla-merian/ —

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A Butterfly Journey: Maria Sibylla Merian. Artist and Scientist Tapa dura – 16 Julio 2015

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• Número de páginas 144 páginas
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• Editorial Prestel
• Fecha de publicación 16 Julio 2015
• Dimensiones 5.69 x 0.69 x 7.5 pulgadas
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• ISBN-13 978-3791381497
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• Editorial ‏ : ‎ Prestel; Illustrated edición (16 Julio 2015)
• Idioma ‏ : ‎ Inglés
• Tapa dura ‏ : ‎ 144 páginas
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 3791381490
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-3791381497
• Dimensiones ‏ : ‎ 5.69 x 0.69 x 7.5 pulgadas
• nº895 en Arte de Plantas y Animales (Libros)
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Sobre el autor

Boris friedewald.

BORIS FRIEDEWALD (born 1969) is an art historian, playwright, and the author of Bauhaus(Prestel). He lives in Berlin.

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The woman who transformed scientific illustration

In 1699, when she was in her early 50s, the naturalist  Maria Sibylla Merian  left her home in Amsterdam and set sail for Suriname in search of insects. The 7,500km voyage would take around two months to complete, and she stayed for almost two years. The detailed pictures she made of the animals and plants that she found there were ground-breaking, changing people’s understanding of the country’s wildlife and cementing Merian’s reputation as one of the most important naturalists of her era.

Merian was set on the path to Suriname from an early age. She was born in Frankfurt in 1647, the daughter of Johanna Sibylla Heyne and printmaker Matthäus Merian. Her father died when she was young, and in 1651 her mother remarried the artist  Jacob Marrel , known for his depictions of plants and flowers. Marrel taught Merian to draw and paint, and instilled in her a passion for botanical art that was central to her own career.

Four Tulips: Boter man (Butter Man), Joncker (Nobleman), Grote geplumaceerde (The Great Plumed One), and Voorwint (With the Wind), c.1635-1645, Jacob Marrel

Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Licence: CC0 1.0

As a child Merian was fascinated by insects, particularly butterflies, moths and silkworms, and would “collect all the caterpillars I could find in order to see how they changed”. Metamorphosis was only partially understood at the time. For centuries, people had assumed that butterflies were born out of dead caterpillars, but scientists such as Jan Swammerdam (1637–1680), who studied insects under the newly-invented microscope, were beginning to challenge that idea. Merian read the latest research with interest, and was soon illustrating her own findings. She published her first study,  The Wonderful Transformation of Caterpillars and their Particular Plant Nourishment , in 1679.

Untitled (from ‘Erucarum Ortus, Alimentum et Paradoxa Metamorphosis’), 1718, Maria Sibylla Merian

Image © Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees, All Rights Reserved

Merian’s illustrations were exceptional for their time, detailed and scientifically accurate (she was careful to draw the insects at life size) but with an element of artistic flair. Rather than paint them diagrammatically, Merian depicted her specimens in motion, crawling and flying around the plants that sustained them. It was an innovative approach that must have captured people’s imaginations. Her career flourished as she moved around northern Europe, first with her husband, the artist Johann Andreas Graff, and later with her two children  Johanna Helena  and  Dorothea Maria  after her marriage broke down.

Untitled (Panorama of Amsterdam from the river Y), 1702, Ludolf Backhuysen I

© Trustees of the British Museum, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

In 1690, Merian settled with her daughters in Amsterdam. The port city was a busy global centre of art, research, trade and commerce, and she found much there to inspire her. Merian befriended experts such as Jan Commelin, who worked at the botanical gardens, and visited the collections of merchants and scientists who had amassed plant and animal specimens from around the world. But her enduring interest in metamorphosis left her wanting more. She could only learn so much by studying dead caterpillars, butterflies and chrysalises; she needed to see them in the flesh. “All this stimulated me to take a long and costly journey in order to pursue my investigations further.”

Untitled (Pineapple), c.1701-1705, Maria Sibylla Merian

Merian found the specimens from Suriname, on the northern coast of South America, particularly fascinating, and presumably learned more about the place from her son-in-law Jakob Hendrik Herolt, who traded there. The country had been confirmed as a Dutch colony in 1667, and towards the end of the century Merian managed to secure permission to travel there on a five-year independent research trip – an unprecedented achievement for a woman at the time. She sold off hundreds of her paintings to fund the voyage, and set off with her daughter Dorothea Maria on 10 July, 1699.

Untitled (Two examples of a blue butterfly), c.1701-1705, Maria Sibylla Merian

On their arrival the pair took a house in the capital Paramaribo and set about collecting, studying, and recording the abundant new plant and animal species that they found in the country. Their research was broad; Merian painted exotic fruits such as bananas and pineapples (which she found particularly delicious), and a host of unusual creatures including iguanas and frogs as well as her beloved insects. She noted down how they were referred to and used by the indigenous communities in Suriname, and recorded her frustration at the lack of interest many of her Western acquaintances showed in the local flora and fauna: “they mocked me for seeking anything other than sugar.” In 1701 Merian was forced to cut her trip short due to illness, but she had already travelled extensively within the country and found species that nobody had studied before.

Metamorphosis of a Frog and Blue Flower, c.1700-1702, Maria Sibylla Merian

Back in Amsterdam she found an enthusiastic audience for her research. After “several nature-lovers had seen my drawings,” she recalled, “they pressured me eagerly to have them printed. They were of the opinion that this was the first and most unusual work ever painted in America.”  Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium , an exquisitely illustrated study of the insect life of Suriname, was published in 1705, after which she embarked on an expanded and updated compendium of her European studies,  Erucarem Ortus . She never saw the final publication, which was completed in 1718, a year after her death.

In the 300 years since then, Merian’s work has been celebrated and relied upon by generations of scientists and naturalists. Carl Linnaeus made early use of it when he systematically classified plant and animal life around the world. He even named several species, including two butterflies, in her honour. Her Surinamese studies offered European people an early and spectacular glimpse of South American flora and fauna, and her illustrations set a new standard for naturalist illustration. Merian’s fascination with metamorphosis transformed her own life and changed a scientific discipline in the process.

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This 17th Century Scientific Illustrator Loved Butterflies Before It Was Cool

Arts and Culture Reporter, HuffPost

Perhaps your 7-year-old self dressed up as a butterfly for Halloween -- no judgment, same here. Or maybe your 9-year-old self plastered her composition notebook full of butterfly stickers. Or, your 12-year-old self looked like she was in the middle of being attacked by an angry hoard of butterflies thanks to the barrettes, chokers and platforms beloved by tween girls in the '90s.

If any of this rings true, allow me to take you on a journey through time, back before butterflies became the adorable emblems of feminine fashionability they are today -- or at least, were in 1997. Let's travel back to the 17th century when butterflies were certainly not trendy. In fact, many presumed the whimsical insects to be demonic.

"For some people, these creatures were the work of the Devil, and those who were interested in them were surely up to no good -- why, they might even be witches, who must be put to death," Boris Friedewald writes in A Butterfly Journey, a brief history of a woman who dared to devote her entire life to them.

That woman was Maria Sibylla Merian . During her lifetime, she'd become the first to observe living insects instead of preserved specimens, to debunk the theory that bugs arose spontaneously from the mud, and to chronicle the entire metamorphosis process of a butterfly. She also created a trove of drawings, painstakingly accurate and stunning depictions of nature's most minuscule creatures, themselves as complex as a humongous beast or bountiful landscape.

Merian was born in 1647 in Frankfurt -- then a free city of the Holy Roman Empire. Her father was a publisher, providing her access to many books about natural history growing up. After he passed away when she was 3 years old, her mother wed a painter of still lifes. At 13 years old, she made her first painting -- a rendering of an insect she'd captured amongst plants.

Merian married her stepfather's apprentice and the two had two daughters. Instead of following custom and working alongside her husband, Merian provided drawing lessons to young, unmarried women, providing her access into the verdant gardens of the upper class. Merian and her husband later divorced.

In 1679, Merian published her first book at 28 years old, a two-volume exploration of insect metamorphosis. In the foreward, Merian wrote: "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. I withdrew from human society and engaged exclusively in these investigations."

The book was augmented by Merian's unique scientific illustrations, which collapsed multiple images of butterflies at their various stages of life into a sort of ecological collage, combined with the flora and fauna that comprised their habitats. Until then, few had shown interest in the lowly creatures on the food chain. The commonly held belief at the time was that bugs were born through a "spontaneous generation of rotting mud."

Merian continued her work despite the fact that, as a woman, the odds were stacked against her. At the time, universities were exclusively male and, strangely, women were forbidden from painting with oils. She instead opted for gouache and watercolor. In the three years following her first book, she produced four more.

In 1691, Merian moved with her daughters to Amsterdam, studying the preserved insect collections of a wealthy doctor. Yet the lifeless subject matter left something to be desired. "In these collections I had found innumerable other insects," she wrote in Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, "but finally if here their origin and their reproduction is unknown, it begs the question as to how they transform, starting from caterpillars and chrysalises and so on. All this has, at the same time, led me to undertake a long dreamed of journey to Suriname."

Suriname is a small country on the northeastern coast of South America, known in part for its tropical rainforests. Merian wanted to forge a scientific expedition to the equatorial habitat, though, at the time, government funding for academic pursuits was typically only provided to men. For eight years, Merian studied and built her case and finally, in 1699, embarked on a cargo ship with her 22-year-old daughter to Suriname on a grant from Amsterdam. A journey as dangerous as this, without a male companion, was virtually unheard of.

Although she was supposed to spend five years illustrating new insects, she returned home after two, after contracting malaria abroad . Her 1705 book Insects of Suriname documented the fruits of her journey, describing the insects she discovered, as well as their uses and habits. The book also contained 60 engravings illustrating the different stages of insect development in what was one of the first illustrated accounts of Suriname's natural history.

Despite her immense contributions to the field, she's rarely cited for her work in mainstream scholarship. Because of her lack of education and, yes, the fact that she was a woman, Merian fell into relative obscurity. When she died in 1717, she was described by the city of Amsterdam’s register of deaths as a woman " without means. "

Recently, Merian has started to receive some of the recognition she so gravely deserves. (What I mean by that, mostly, is that in 2013 she got her own Google doodle .) But her name remains unknown in many art and science circles.

Still, without Merian's skill and courage, we might never have known that bugs aren't demonic creatures that shoot out of the ground. Or that butterflies begin as caterpillars and become chrysalis and then the real-deal, winged butterfly.

And then, of course, there's the frightening possibility that that adorable butterfly costume of yours never would have existed.

Merian's work was recently on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in the group exhibition Super Natural. Learn more about her incredible life and work in " A Butterfly Journey: Maria Sibylla Merian. Artist and Scientist " by Boris Friedewald .

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Product Identifiers

• Publisher Prestel Gmbh & Co KG.
• ISBN-10 3791381490
• ISBN-13 9783791381497
• eBay Product ID (ePID) 211266051

Product Key Features

• Book Title Butterfly Journey : Maria Sibylla Merian. Artist and Scientist
• Author Boris Friedewald
• Format Hardcover
• Language English
• Topic Cultural Heritage, Individual Artists / Monographs, Subjects & Themes / Plants & Animals, Artists, Architects, Photographers, Life Sciences / Zoology / Entomology
• Publication Year 2015
• Genre Biography & Autobiography, Art, Science
• Number of Pages 144 Pages
• Item Length 7.5in
• Item Height 0.7in
• Item Width 5.7in
• Item Weight 13.3 Oz

Additional Product Features

• Lc Classification Number Ql31
• Copyright Date 2015
• Target Audience Trade
• Lccn 2015-458980
• Dewey Decimal 508.092 B
• Dewey Edition 23
• Illustrated Yes

Artists Hardcover Nonfiction Books

Artists hardcover nonfiction books signed, artists hardcover nonfiction books in portuguese, artists hardcover nonfiction books in english, artists hardcover nonfiction books in chinese, art & culture artists hardcover nonfiction books.

New Butterfly Species Named After 17th-Century Female Naturalist

Maria Sibylla Merian documented the lifecycles of moths and butterflies with unprecedented accuracy

Brigit Katz

Correspondent

From an early age, the 17th century, barrier-breaking naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian loved insects—particularly butterflies. She collected every caterpillar she could find, and watched closely as they shrunk into pupae and then blossomed into fluttery insects. Merian published her meticulous observations in beautifully illustrated books, bringing empirical rigor to a field largely dominated by men who clung to the belief that insects generated spontaneously. And in a fitting new development, a rare butterfly has been named in Merian’s honor.

The newly named butterfly is known to scientists from only two male specimens, reports Sarah Laskow of Atlas Obscura . One has been held by the Smithsonian Natural History Museum since 1981, but for many years it languished in a drawer, forgotten. Recently, however, a University of Florida graduate student named Pablo Sebastián Padrón stumbled upon the butterfly in the collections. He sent a picture of the specimen to Shinichi Nakahara, a lepidopterist at the Florida Museum of Natural History, hoping that Nakahara would be able to identify it. But Nakahara was stumped.

The insect, which had been found in Panama, was strange. It had several distinctive features of the large Pieridae family of butterflies, but unlike most Pieridae, it was not colorful. Instead, the butterfly was black, with two striking rows of white dots lining its wings.

Several months later, as luck would have it, Mississippi State University entomologist John MacDonald happened to find a similar specimen, which had also been sourced from Panama. MacDonald sent a photo of the butterfly to Nakahara, who in turn requested one of its legs so he could perform genetic testing. DNA confirmed that the two butterflies belonged to the same pierid species—one that had never been described before.

In a paper introducing the butterfly, Nakahara and his colleagues name the species Catasticta sibyllae , in honor of Maria Sibylla Merian. A number of creatures—including a Cuban sphinx moth, a species of cane toad, a snail, a lizard, a bird-eating spider, a genus of praying mantises, a genus of exotic flowering plants, a species of bugle lily, and two sub-species of butterfly—have already been named after her. But this is the first time that a fully-fledged butterfly species will bear Merian’s name.

“Since this is such a distinctive butterfly, we wanted to name it after someone who would deserve it,” Nakahara says .

Born in Germany in 1647, Merian was an artist by training. She studied under her stepfather, the still-life painter Jacob Marrel, and often painted flowers in her early career. Then, she turned her attention to the silk worms, caterpillars, butterflies and moths that so fascinated her. In 1679, she published Der Raupen wunderbarer Verwandlung ( The Wondrous Transformation of Caterpillars ), which included lively and detailed illustrations of the insects’ life cycles. It was, according to Andrea Wulf of the Atlantic , “unlike any other book yet written.”

No previous work had so precisely detailed insects’ distinct life phases. What’s more, Merian did not draw her subjects as disembodied figures against a blank page. She depicted them on plants and branches, and in relation to one another. “And at a time when other scientists were trying to make sense of the natural world by classifying plants and animals into narrow categories, Merian looked at their place within the wider natural world,” Wulf writes. “She searched for connections where others were looking for separation.”

Merian was married at the age of 16, but she split from her husband in 1685 and moved away with her two daughters—first to a religious colony in modern-day Netherlands, then to Amsterdam. In 1699, she and her youngest daughter embarked on a two-year trip to Surinam, then a Dutch colony in South America. There, Merian waded into the jungle to study foreign species, which she illustrated with her characteristic attention to both biology and beauty. The result of that trip was the 1705 book Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (“The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Surinam”), which included around 60 engravings showing the development of various insects.

Merian died in 1717, more than 15 years before the Swedish naturalist Charles Linnaeus introduced his ground-breaking system for classifying the natural world. Linnaeus, in fact, relied on Merian’s work to describe a number of species. Her illustrations were so accurate that modern entomologists have been able to identify the genus of 73 percent of the butterflies and moths in Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium , and match 56 percent of the insects to precise species.

“Merian was centuries ahead of her time, and her discoveries changed the course of entomology,” Nakahara says . “The fact that she accomplished so much against all odds—as a divorced woman in the 17th century who taught herself natural history—is remarkable. And she did it so beautifully.”

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Brigit Katz | | READ MORE

Brigit Katz is a freelance writer based in Toronto. Her work has appeared in a number of publications, including NYmag.com, Flavorwire and Tina Brown Media's Women in the World.