Maria Sybilla Merian, a naturalist, etymologist and artist was born in Frankfort of Swiss parents. Her father Matthaus Merian the Elder was a known geographer and naturalist, who also owned a publishing company. In 1641, he published the first catalog of flower engravings in response to the Dutch flower mania. After his death in 1650, her mother married Jacob Marrell, a German/Flemish flower painter, who trained Maria and Johann Andreas Graff. Johann and Maria were married in 1665. Their marriage was not a happy one, though it produced two daughters, Johanna Helen (b.1668) and Dorothea Maria (b.1678).

At the age of thirteen Maria began collecting and raising caterpillars, in particular silkworm, since Frankfort was the center of the silk trade. “I spent my time investigating insects. At the beginning, I started with silk worms in my home town of Frankfort. I realized that other caterpillars produced beautiful butterflies or moths, and silkworms did the same. This led me to collect all the caterpillars I could find in order to see how they changed.” Rather than studying preserved specimens, as was the custom at the time, Merian worked from live specimens that she raised. She often stayed up at night watching their changes from caterpillar, to cocoon, to butterfly or moth. “The only reliable approach to the study of natural phenomena is through observation.” Her first published book, The New Flower Book (1675) was intended to provide illustrations for women who would use them in embroidery and painting. Maria’s painted drawings were engraved and hand colored and printed with descriptive text. The “Province Rose” (Rosa Centifolia) was an image she employed often as gifts for friends. The published images were engraved on copper plates and hand colored. Her second book The Caterpillar, Marvelous Transformation and Strange Floral Food (1677) illustrated the life cycles of caterpillars. It was reissued in 1717 in two volumes containing 186 moths and butterflies. She published her third collection of transformations in 1680.

Marian was the first to research and illustrate the actual life cycles of caterpillars. Her work revealed that life did not come from inanimate matter. The belief at the time, held since Aristotle, was in spontaneous generation. Flies and maggots came from rotting meat, moths from wool, insects from mud, or dew, or books, frogs from raindrops, and caterpillars from cabbages. Her research resulted in the naming of six plants, nine butterflies, two bugs, one lizard, and one spider in her honor. The “Milk Thistle” is one example.

From 1670 to 1680 the family lived in Nuremberg, Germany. Merian was responsible for all of the usual wifely duties, taught her daughters to paint, and received an income by teaching the children of wealthy parents to paint. She left her husband in 1685, and moved with her two daughters to the Labadist religious settlement in West Friesland, a Dutch province. The Labadist practiced celibacy and did not believe in formal marriage. Merian declared she was a widow; however, a still alive Graff divorced her in 1692. Relocation to Amsterdam in 1690, opened more avenues for Marian’s research. She was able to study the extensive collection of Frederick Ruysch, father of Rachel Ruysch, whose flower paintings were discussed in an earlier SPY article. World trade was at its height in Amsterdam where women educated were women had the right to own business. Collectors opened their extensive Curiosity Cabinets that contain exotic specimens to her, and she joined scholars, physicians and botanist in discussion. She was admitted to the Painters Guild which prohibited women members from using oil paint; as result she became solely a watercolorist. She and her daughters were artists and they made a living by preparing pigment and specimens for the burgeoning number of collectors.

At the age of fifty-two, Merian’s intense interest in her work gave her the incentive and necessary courage to travel with her daughter and the Labadist to the Dutch Colony of Surinam [Dutch Guiana] in South America, where she worked from 1699 to1701. The mission of the colonists was supported by Amsterdam; Merian received a small stipend from the Dutch government to fund her research. “Pineapple with butterfly and cockroach”(1701-05) is the first plate from her most famous book Dissertation in Insect Generations and Metamorphosis in Suriman (1705)(60 plates). “This fruit tastes as though one had mixed grapes, apricots, red currants, apples and pears and were able to taste them all at once.” Published in Dutch and Latin and translated into several other languages, Metamorphosis established her international reputation.

When she arrived at Suriman’s capital Paramaribo, there were 500 wooden houses, two brick houses, cocoa and sugar plantations, rivers, fields and rain forest. Her first problem was the Dutch planters who thought her incompetent and frivolous. A resourceful and determined woman, she turned to the Native population and enslaved Africans for help. For two years they aided her to navigate the rivers, negotiate the dense rain forest, and collect hundred’s of specimens to study.

She made extensive notes and published her comments with the plates. “There are very large ants in American who strip trees bare as brooms in one night: they have two curved teeth built like scissors and with these they cut leaves from the trees and let them fall down, so that tree looks like a European tree during wintertime.” Plate #18 “shows the branch of a guava tree almost defoliated by leaf cutter and army ants which are crawling up the stem. A few ants attack a small spider and a cockroach, while a tarantula eats a hummingbird. There are different species of spiders and yet another tarantula with an egg sac.”

Plate #45 “Peacock Flower” depicts an orange peacock flower, with a Carolina spinx moth sucking nectar from it. Merian’s relationships with the Indigenous people and African slaves extended to their sharing with her the various medicinal and culinary uses of plants. She described the plant as “9 feet tall. It bears yellow and red flowers. The seed is used by women giving birth to carry on the labor, to abort their children, not wanting their children to be slaves like them. The black female slaves from Guinea and Angola have to be treated very kindly. Otherwise they do not want children in their slavery and will not have any. Indeed, they sometimes even kill them because of the harsh treatment commonly inflicted on them, because they feel that they will be reborn in a free state in the country of their friends, as I heard from their own lips.”

Marian left Surinam in 1701 due to malaria. She sold her collection and worked on a new book of Surniam specimens, published in 1705. Subsequent editions were published in 1717 and 1725. A stroke in 1715 left her partially paralyzed and penniless. She was supported by her children until her death in 1717 at the age of 70. Just before her death, Russian Czar Peter the Great purchased a two volume collection of her unbound paintings and a journal of youthful studies Studienbuch.

Unfortunately, after her death Merian’s works were republished and significant alterations were made to make her flowers more artistically pleasing, in order to increase sales. Her explicit portrayals of tarantulas eating hummingbirds, bridges of leaf cutter ants, and other graphic images, were debunked. An example can be found in the1830’s article in the Landsdown Guilding called her work “careless”, “worthless” and “vile and useless.” Other accused her of relying too heavily upon her Indigenous helpers whose information was clearly unreliable. She also was criticized for being too old, out of her depth, or subject to flights of fancy.

Merian’s significance and the validity of her work assured her international reputation. Numerous copies of her books are re-published and articles continue to be written about her. Exhibitions of her works are worldwide. On the 300th Anniversary of her death the New York Times described her accomplishments: “…as far as we know, the only all-female scientific illustration workshop in Europe during her lifetime; that she described the life cycles of nearly 200 species of insects and amphibians; that she used the money she made from scientific illustrations to fund her research trips to South America – in an age when science was largely the pursuit of independently wealthy men Merian was (even more!) unusual in that she made her living from science.”

Maria Sybilla Merian was a singular woman of her time.

Beverly Hall Smith was a professor of art history for 40 years.  Since retiring with her husband Kurt to Chestertown six years ago, she has taught art history classes at WC-ALL and Chesapeake College’s Institute for Adult Learning.  She is also an artist whose work is sometimes in exhibitions at Chestertown RiverArts and she paints sets for the Garfield Center for the Arts.