Rocky Road: Maria Sibylla Merian

Maria Sibylla Merian

From Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution by Lisa Jardine

In the late 17th-century, two society ladies in Nuremburg visited a local garden. Dripping with finery, they pounced upon a lowly worm, a caterpillar, to be exact, and happily carried it home like a treasure. This incident was later recounted with amusement by one of those nicely dressed ladies. It was a glimpse into an unusual life.

In a world of natural history generalists, Maria Sibylla Merian, (also known as Maria Sybilla Merian) was a specialist, concentrating almost her entire life on how moths and butterflies metamorphosed from caterpillars. In her early 50s, she followed her passion halfway around the world and risked death from disease to study these bugs in their natural habitat.

Born into a family of Frankfurt printers, Merian lived in an age when disease and untimely death created clans rivaling today's "blended" families. Her father, Matthaus Merian the Elder, had been married and widowed before he wed her mother, Johanna. Born in 1647, Maria had adult half-brothers when she was still tiny. When she was just three, her biological father died, and a year later, her mother married painter Jacob Marrel, who brought children from his previous marriage. Marrel and Maria's mother had two children together, but both babies died, and once Marrel's own children were grown, he left. He continued to support Johanna somewhat, but Maria and her mother were on their own. Maria was only 12.

Widows owning businesses raised eyebrows, but the practice wasn't unheard of. Only a teenager, Maria helped keep the printing business afloat. A year after her stepfather left, she started studying insects. She captured them, raised them, and drew them at their various life stages.

From Maria Sibylla Merian: New Book of Flowers by Melanie Klier

Still in her teens, Maria married a former print shop employee, Johann Andreas Graff, who was nearly 30. Few details are known about their union, except that it eventually soured — and produced only two children when most marriages of similar duration produced about 10. When the Graffs' first daughter was still a baby, they moved to his hometown of Nuremberg, and there, Maria began publishing. At first, she focused on pretty flowers, but eventually bugs took over the pictures. After 14 years, the family returned to Frankfurt. Not long afterwards, Graff traveled back to Nuremburg alone. Then Maria moved her two daughters, her aging mother and herself to the Netherlands to join a strict religious sect: the Labadists. Founded by a Jesuit-turned-Protestant, the group aimed for a primitive version of Christianity.

Graff followed his family to the religious outpost and pleaded with his wife to return, but she refused. He eventually gave up and left, but he didn't exactly leave his family in paradise. In the Labadist community, privation ruled: plain clothes, simple food (and not much of it), few fires to ward off the cold. Personal property became community property. Maria's religious fervor eventually cooled, and not long after her mother died, she left for Amsterdam.

After years with the Labadists, Maria — who reverted to her maiden name of Merian — found herself in a city 500 times as big as the religious community she had left, and this time, she couldn't rely on her husband or her family for connections. Yet as a woman, she probably couldn't have found a better place to settle. She lived when women had to negotiate a tricky maze to avoid trouble. Witch fever was raging in Salem, and had only recently cooled in her native Germany. Insects still carried a whiff of corruption, and a woman who wanted to study them was suspect. But Amsterdam hadn't burned a witch in a century. Even better, women could own businesses, keep their own property, and train as apprentices. Merian could mingle with other women artists, even sniff around the curiosity cabinets of Frederik Ruysch. After several years, she was well-connected and well off. And restless.

She was successful in Amsterdam, but the success came at a price. Merian was so busy earning a living that she had virtually no time to follow bugs. Her chance to resume her studies came from an unexpected corner. Though she had left the Labadist settlement at Wiewert (it had, in fact, disbanded), she stayed in touch with some of her old acquaintances, and it turned out that Labadists still operated a plantation in far-off South America, in Surinam. Merian sold more than 200 of her paintings to raise money, collected her younger daughter, and boarded a ship. It was 1699, and Merian was 52.

From Chrysalis by Kim Todd

In the Surinam jungle, Merian hoped to understand metamorphosis in as many species as possible. She did find new species she had never encountered before, but the jungle brought difficulties she could not have imagined. Up to this point, she had done much of her collecting in gardens designed for human enjoyment, with flowers and the bugs eating them conveniently placed below eye level. South American jungles didn't accommodate humans so nicely. Trees shot skyward as much as 150 feet, with different kinds of animals living in different layers, and most of the action above the canopy. Locals often helped her out, but when they brought her a bug, she didn't know what to feed it or how to keep it alive.

Surinam was in the territory of the Dutch West India Company, and unlike the spice-rich Dutch East India Company, the western branch made its money from the slave trade. Many of the locals who helped Merian were slaves, either American Indian or African. No abolitionist, Merian had slaves of her own in Surinam, though she was often horrified at how slaves were treated. She actually had much thornier relations with the Dutch planters who, she felt, mocked her for caring about anything besides sugar.

Despite the heat and hardship, Surinam was in many ways a naturalist's paradise. She found moths with foot-wide wingspans. A bright blue lizard laid iridescent eggs in a corner of her house, and she took the eggs with her when she returned to Europe. (Taking home specimens was a risky business in those days. When specimens were preserved in spirits, unfussy sailors would toss out the specimens and drink the leftover brandy.)

Merian had hoped to stay about five years, but tropical fever, perhaps yellow fever or malaria, forced her to leave after two. Regret tinged her accounts years afterwards as she was unable to piece together the life cycles of so many insects. One observation she did manage to make was that pretty caterpillars often became drab butterflies, and lackluster caterpillars frequently turned into beautiful butterflies. Of one, she wrote, "I took this caterpillar home with me and it rapidly changed into a pale wood-colored chrysalis, like the one here lying on the twig; two weeks later, towards the end of January 1700, this most beautiful butterfly emerged, looking like polished silver overlaid with the loveliest ultramarine, green and purple, and indescribably beautiful; its beauty cannot possibly be rendered with the paintbrush."

Back in Holland, Merian could have profited nicely from selling her wildlife paintings to rich buyers, but she was the daughter of a printer, and a believer in sharing knowledge. In 1705, she published Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium. The book brought her recognition, but not great wealth, and she had to sell specimens and paintings from time to time to keep afloat. She also worked on illustrations for work by the "blind seer of Ambon," Rumphius. Merian lived until 1717, and the day she was buried was apparently the day that Peter the Great's personal physician arranged to have some of her papers shipped to St. Petersburg. The doctor so admired her personal study book, which she had maintained since girlhood, that he kept it for himself.

Merian's work certainly did contain some errors, but no one's work was error free. Accuracy was an extra tough standard in her day, when art couldn't just show plants and animals, it also had to communicate the right symbolic meaning. Each plant carried its own message, and the larger composition had its own larger message, too. After she died, new versions of her book saw publication, none of them improvements. In fact, later books were so adulterated with misinformation (not uncommon on those days) that her reputation suffered. It rebounded somewhat when the Soviet Union released some of her original artwork in the 1970s. Today she is remembered as someone with singular focus on metamorphosis and, in a larger sense, the importance of studying the animal's habitat along with its anatomy.

For more information:
Chrysalis by Kim Todd
Voyages of Discovery by Tony Rice
Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution by Lisa Jardine
Amazing Rare Things by Attenborough, Owens, Clayton and Alexandratos
Matters of Exchange by Harold J. Cook
Chance in the House of Fate by Jennifer Ackerman
Plants and Empire by Londa Schiebinger
Visualizations by Martin Kemp
A Cabinet of Natural Curiosities by Albertus Seba
The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet by Georgius Everhardus Rumphius
The Great Naturalists edited by Robert Huxley
Seen|Unseen by Martin Kemp
Maria Sibylla Merian: New Book of Flowers by Melanie Klier