The amazing Maria Sibylla Merian

The name Merian, if known at all in England, is usually associated with Matthäus Merian, the engraver of detailed Veduten, portraits of European cities, in the middle of the seventeenth century, such as the view of Mühlhausen from about 1630. In his own publishing firm in Frankfurt am Main he published from 1642 onward the Topographia Germaniae, with over 2000 views and maps of cities and towns, such, for example, as Danzig, now Gdansk in Poland,

or Frankfurt am Main.

He travelled all over Europe recording major events such as the siege of Prague during the Thirty Years War, as well as topographical details of every place he visited. He was twenty-five when the war began and he died in 1650, just two years after it ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. More than half the population of Germany had been killed or had died of plague or starvation. It is astonishing that Merian was able to continue working throughout this difficult and dangerous period.

His oldest son, Matthäus Merian the Younger, and his brother Caspar carried on their father’s publishing business after his death. Their little half-sister Maria Sibylla was born in 1647, the daughter of Matthäus Merian’s second wife. She evidently inherited the artistic talents of the family. When her mother married again and moved to a different part of Frankfurt, Maria Sibylla was given lessons in painting by her step-father, a successful painter with connections to the Netherlands, a fact that was to become significant for his daughter in later life. The little girl had the run of the workshop and learnt to paint on paper and parchment, as well as to engrave. In the biography of Maria Sibylla Merian by Charlotte Kerner (Seidenraupe, Dschungelblüte 1988 Beltz Verlag) the story is told of how the little girl used to escape from her very strict mother to the attic, where she had set up her own “studio”. She had an absolute passion for painting flowers and used, at night, to creep into the garden of a nobleman’s house nearby where she picked or dug up the baron’s extremely valuable tulips. He caught her in the act one night and there was an angry scene at home until the baron was shown her paintings. He was considerably impressed and in the end was happy to receive her portrait of his best tulip by way of compensation.

Maria Sibylla Merian was growing up at a time when prosperity was returning to Germany and the manufacture of silk was beginning a period of boom. She took to visiting a silkworm breeder and was allowed to take some silkworms home with her. The fascination of watching them develop from cocoon to beautiful moth stimulated in her a curiosity about insects and animals which became the most important thing in her life.

At the age of thirteen in 1660 Maria Sibylla began to draw from nature the silkworms and other caterpillars, their cocoons and the moths or butterflies into which they were transformed. From that moment on she became an avid collector of insects and especially of butterflies. After her marriage in 1665 to Johann Andreas Graff, a painter and engraver, Maria Sibylla helped the family finances by embroidering and painting table-cloths for the trousseaus of well-to-do young ladies. Their first daughter, Johanna Helena, was born in 1668, the second, Dorothea Maria, not until 1678. Both daughters were to play a very important part in their mother’s career. In 1670 the family moved to Nürnberg, where Maria Sibylla continued her collecting and painting, and started a small school for upper-class girls to learn embroidery and painting. Some of those girls became life-long friends and bought all their paints, brushes and other art materials from her, as well as the butterflies she conserved so skillfully. Now that so many species have been lost or become endangered it might be tempting to disapprove of collecting butterflies, but one has to remember that Frau Merian was actually performing an important work in recording more entomological and botanical detail than had ever been done before or would be done again until the Swedish botanist, Carl von Linné, published his Systema Naturae in 1735. Her most important observations included the division of Lepidoptera into moths, active at night, and butterflies, active in the daytime, but, most significantly, from the environmental point of view, she was the first to note that the caterpillars of each species were dependent on particular plants for their food and could not exist without them.

Between 1675 and 1679 Maria Sibylla Merian published her Neues Blumenbuch in three parts and the book on the metamorphosis of caterpillars Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandlung und sonderbare Blumennahrung. Nearly twenty years of research and painting preceded this work, for which she also engraved the illustrations in copper and wrote the text. The German word for a butterfly, Schmetterling, is derived from the old German word Schmetten for cream, and the name refers to a fly which was able to turn dairy produce sour. Insects were thought to be the Devil’s work and butterflies were supposed to be witches in disguise. To be seen to take an unusual interest in such things was distinctly risky and caused much suspicious comment among the neighbours in Nürnberg. Witches were still being burnt at the stake a hundred years later. Maria Sibylla was fortunate in the support she received from her publisher husband. Her Raupenbuch was shown at the Frankfurt Book Fair and attracted a good deal of interest. The fact that the text was entirely in German, unusual at a time when all learned works were written in Latin, meant that it could be read by those who had not received a classical education, the ordinary people and particularly the girls whom Frau Merian taught in her school for the daughters of local families.

In 1685 Maria Sibylla separated from her husband and moved with her two daughters to Holland. It was here that the part of her life began which led to the adventurous journey to Suriname on the north coast of South America and the eventual publication of her most amazing and beautiful work on the insect life of the tropical rain forest, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, from which the following illustrations are taken.

Maria Sibylla met people in Holland who regularly sailed to the Dutch trading station in Suriname, whence they brought back specimens of plants and animals. Needless to say she was fascinated and made up her mind to go there. Her friends advised her strongly against such a journey – the sea voyage alone took three months and the tropical climate of Suriname harboured a number of serious diseases, not least malaria. But she was not to be deterred and in 1699 at the age of 52 she set sail with her daughter Dorothea. They spent two years living in the Dutch colony, collecting insects, making minutely detailed notes and paintings, all of which later became part of the sixty engravings in her famous work, the Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, finally published in 1705. The Dutch colonists regarded them with some amusement, but the natives became her friends and from them she learnt an immense amount about the indigenous flora and fauna. Armed with easel, parchments and paints, the two women braved the heat and discomfort of the rain forest, not to mention attacks of malaria, and were able, by preserving them in brandy, even to bring back samples of butterflies and insects which they then exhibited in Amsterdam.

The fame of Maria Sibylla Merian spread throughout Europe during her lifetime. Even the Tsar Peter the Great bought her works and they later became part of the collection at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Dorothea, the younger daughter, married the painter Georg Gsell who in 1719 was made court painter to Peter the Great. The elder daughter, Johanna, had married a Dutch merchant and accompanied him on trips to Suriname, and was thus able to continue supplying her mother with specimens of insects. Both daughters were accomplished artists themselves and much involved in their mother’s work, which they were able to complete after her death in 1717. It is an impressive story by any standards, but plain words give little hint of the enormous physical, mental and creative effort required to write the scientific text, engrave the copper plates for the enormous number of illustrations, organise the printing and sale of the various works and all at the same time as running a form of early mail-order supply of artists equipment and insect specimens.

All Maria Sibylla Merian’s books were republished by the Insel Verlag in Frankfurt am Main in 1999 on the occasion of the centenary of the firm’s foundation in Leipzig. Like many other publishing houses, Insel survived with difficulty the vicissitudes of the Nazi years, the Second World War and the division of Germany. Bombs destroyed the entire firm and one million books in December 1943. After the war a second branch was opened in Wiesbaden, then moved to Frankfurt where the whole business was absorbed later into the Suhrkamp Verlag. The following four engravings from the Suriname collection are taken from Das kleine Buch der Tropenwunder first published by Frau Merian herself in 1705 in Amsterdam, and in 1954 by the Insel Verlag, now a much sought-after edition.

There is a superb web-site in German, beautifully illustrated with insects and butterflies that appear and disappear as you move the cursor, and music from the early eighteenth century in the background, at http://home.wtal.de/hh/ and a large number of her engravings can be seen in the http://www.artcyclopedia.com/ . In 2002 a book about Maria Sibylla Merian appeared: Dieter Kühn – Frau Merian - eine Lebensgeschichte in S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main. The author apparently tells her story in the first person and, to judge by the description published on the Amazon.de website, he makes it deservedly exciting. Moreover, since this was published various books have appeared in English and the English Wikipedia also devotes a respectable article to this interesting woman.