Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that answer the question.
Query: What years did Maria Sibylla Merian live?
Maria Sibylla Merian (2 April 1647–13 January 1717[1]) was a German-born naturalist and scientific illustrator, a descendant of the Frankfurt branch of the Swiss Merian family. Merian was one of the first naturalists to observe insects directly.
Dorothea Maria Graff was born in Nuremberg as the daughter of the painters Maria Sibylla Merian and Johann Andreas Graff, and learned to paint from them and her sister Johanna Helena Herolt who was ten years older. In 1681 her mother returned to Frankfurt without her father, in order to live with her mother after her stepfather Jacob Marrel's death. Though Johann Graff joined his family later, in 1686 Merian left her husband and moved with her two daughters and her mother to a religious community of Labadists in Wieuwerd, Friesland. Johann Graff made various attempts at reconciliation but eventually returned to Germany. In 1691 the four women moved to Amsterdam, where they set up a studio painting flowers and botanical subjects, continuing Merian's work on "The Caterpillar Book". In 1699 Dorothea accompanied her mother to Surinam and they returned in September 1701.
In 1678, the family had moved to Frankfurt am Main, but her marriage was an unhappy one.[4] She moved in with her mother, after her stepfather died in 1681. In 1683 she travelled to Gottorp and was attracted to the Labadists community in Holstein. In 1685 Merian travelled with her mother, husband and children to Friesland where her half-brother Caspar Merian had lived since 1677.
Merian had started to collect insects as an adolescent and kept a study journal. Aged 13 she raised silk worms and other insects. Her interest turned to moths and butterflies, which she collected and studied. While living in Nuremberg and Frankfurt Merian would travel to the surrounding countryside to search for caterpillar larvae. She recorded their food plants, the timing of their metamorphoses, and noted the behaviour she observed.[30] It was not unusual for naturalists to illustrate their own research, but Merian was among the first professionally trained artists to illustrate her lifelong studies and observations.
Other women still-life painters, such as Merian's contemporary Margaretha de Heer, included insects in their floral pictures, but did not breed or study them. While women of Merian's day did collect butterflies, the amateur science of naturalism was practised by men.[9] In 1679 she published her first work on insects, the first of a two-volume illustrated book focusing on insect metamorphosis.[4]
Merian was described as lively, hard working and courteous by a visiting scholar in 1711. Her house was full of drawings, insects, plants, fruit and on the walls were her Surinam watercolours.[58] Shortly before Merian's death, her work was seen in Amsterdam by Peter the Great. After her death, he acquired a significant number of her paintings[59] which to this day are kept in academic collections in St. Petersburg.[60]
Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium: images at website sponsored by Johns Hopkins University (1705) - full digital facsimile from the Linda Hall Library from the Digital Library of the Caribbean Ingrid Rowland on Merian from The New York Review of Books , images from collection at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with links to digitized works from Maria Sibylla Merian and digital sources
In 1699, the city of Amsterdam granted Merian permission to travel to Suriname in South America, along with her younger daughter Dorothea Maria. On 10 July, the fifty-two year old Merian and her daughter set sail. The goal of the mission was to spend five years illustrating new species of insects.[4] In order to finance the mission, Maria Sibylla sold 255 of her own paintings.[16] Before departing, she wrote:
The universal classification system for all organisms was started by Carl Linnaeus about 30 years after Merian had published her research on Suriname. It is organised in five levels of kingdom, class, order, genus and species.[47] After her death Merian became so renowned among biologists that number of taxa, and two genera, were named after her. Two butterflies have been named after her, the common postman butterfly Heliconius melpomene meriana and a split-banded owlet butterfly Opsiphanes cassina merianae. The Cuban sphinx moth has been named Erinnyis merianae. A bug with no common name has been named Plisthenes merianae. A genus of mantises has been named Sibylla.[61]
In 1715, Merian suffered a stroke. Despite being partially paralysed she continued her work.[14] Maria Sibylla Merian died in Amsterdam on 13 January 1717 and was buried four days later at Leidse kerkhof.[20] The death register lists her as a pauper.[21] Her daughter Dorothea published Erucarum Ortus Alimentum et Paradoxa Metamorphosis, a collection of her mother's work, posthumously.
The name honors Maria Sibylla Merian, a 17th century European naturalist and entomologist who studied butterflies in South America.
From 1685 onwards Merian, her daughters and her mother lived with the Labadist community, who had settled on the grounds of a stately home – Walt(h)a Castle – at Wieuwerd in Friesland. They stayed there for three years and Merian found the time to study natural history and Latin, the language in which scientific books were written.[7] In the moors of Friesland she observed the birth and development of frogs, and collected them to dissect them.[10] Merian stayed with the community until 1691.[7]
Maria Sibylla Merian's father, the Swiss engraver and publisher Matthäus Merian the Elder, married her mother, his second wife, Johanna Sybilla Heyne, in 1646. Maria was born within the next year in 1647, making her his 9th child. Her father died in 1650, and in 1651 her mother remarried Jacob Marrel, the flower and still life painter. Marrel encouraged Merian to draw and paint. While he lived mostly in Holland, his pupil Abraham Mignon trained her. At the age of thirteen she painted her first images of insects and plants from specimens she had captured.[4] Early on, she had access to many books about natural history.[5] Regarding her youth, in the foreword to Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, Merian wrote:[6]
Merian in her detailed studies made several other unique observations. In relation to larvae she recorded that "many shed their skins completely three or four times". She illustrated this with a drawing showing a shed exoskeleton.[32] She also detailed the ways in which larvae formed their cocoons, the possible effects of climate on their metamorphosis and numbers, their mode of locomotion, and the fact that when caterpillars "have no food, they devour each other". Such information was recorded by Merian for specific species.[34]
Merian arrived on 18/19 September in Surinam, and met with the governor Paulus van der Veen. She worked for two years,[17] traveling around the colony and sketching local animals and plants. She recorded local native names for the plants and described local uses.[4]
Merian was the first European women to independently go on a scientific expedition in South America. In the 19th century Ida Pfeiffer, Alexandrine Tinne, Florence Baker, Mary French Sheldon, Mary Henrietta Kingsley and Marianne North followed in her footsteps and explore the natural world of Africa. Margaret Fountaine studied butterflies on five continents.[48] Merian's scientific expedition of Surinam predated Alexander von Humboldt's famous South America expedition by 100 years, and that of Princess Theresa of Bavaria by 200 years.[49] Merian's publication on her expedition was later identified as a key exponent of illustrated geographical publications originating in Holland in the late 17th century, which marketed an exotic but accessible new world to Europeans.[50]
Merian also sold hand coloured editions of the Blumenbuch series.[28] Merian's process of creating her art used vellum which she primed with a white coat.[29] Because of the guild system women were not allowed to paint in oil.[16] Merian painted with watercolors and gouache, instead.[29]
In 1617, Merian married Maria Magdalena de Bry, daughter of the publisher, and was for a time associated with the de Bry publishing house. In 1620, when Oppenheim was destroyed by fire during the Spanish occupation, they moved back to Basel, but three years later returned to Germany, this time to Frankfurt. They had four daughters and three sons, including Matthäus Merian the Younger. Maria Magdalena de Bry died in 1645 and the following year Matthäus married Johanna Catharina Hein. Five years later, Matthäus died, leaving his wife with two small children, Anna Maria Sibylla Merian (born 1647) who later became a pioneering naturalist and illustrator and a son, Maximilian, who died before his third birthday.
Merian received her artistic training from her stepfather, Jacob Marrel, a student of the still life painter Georg Flegel. Merian published her first book of natural illustrations in 1675. She had started to collect insects as an adolescent and at age thirteen she raised silk worms. In 1679 Merian published the first volume of a two-volume series on caterpillars, the second volume followed in 1683. Each volume contained 50 plates engraved and etched by Merian. Merian documented evidence on the process of metamorphosis and the plant hosts of 186 European insect species. Along with the illustrations Merian included a descriptions of their life cycles.
Timeline of women in science
Merian was one of the first naturalists to observe insects directly.[4] Merian collected and observed live insects and created detailed drawings. In her time insects still had a reputation as "beasts of the devil" and the process of metamorphosis was largely unknown. While a handful of scholars had published empirical information on the insect, moth and butterfly life cycle, the widespread contemporary believe was that they were "born of mud" by spontaneous generation. Merian documented evidence to the contrary and described the life cycles of 186 insect species.[14]
Today, while Merian has experienced reinvigorated fame in the eyes of the art and science communities, some of her work has finally been accurately re-attributed to her daughters, Dorothea and Johanna. Joanna Helena Herolt often did not receive credit for her artwork because they were created in collaboration with her mother. Today her works are in the process of recovery. Similarly, Dorothea Maria Graff's images have only recently been accredited to the German painter: Sam Segal has re-attributed 30 or 91 folios in the British Museum.
In 1690, Merian's mother had died. A year later, she moved with her daughters to Amsterdam. In 1692, her husband divorced her. In Amsterdam the same year, her daughter Johanna married Jakob Hendrik Herolt, a successful merchant on Surinam, originally from Bacharach. The flower painter Rachel Ruysch became Merian's pupil.[14] Merian made a living selling her paintings.[7] She and her daughter Johanna sold flower pictures to art collector Agnes Block. By 1698 Merian lived in a well-furnished house on Kerkstraat.[15]
Marrel's stepdaughter Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717), daughter of the engraver Matthew Merian, who lived with Marrel and thus studied with Mignon, achieved distinction as a flower painter. Besides Merian, his other pupil was Ernst Stuven. He left two daughters when he died; Catharina and Anna.
The renewed scientific and artistic interest in her work was triggered in part by a number of scholars who examined collection of her works, such as the one in Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen.[66] In 2005, a modern research vessel named Maria S. Merian was launched at Warnemünde, Germany. In 2016, Merian's Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium was re-published with updated scientific descriptions and, in June 2017, a symposium was held in her honour in Amsterdam.[67][68][69] In March 2017, the Lloyd Library and Museum hosted a "Off the Page", an exhibit rendering many of Merian's illustrations as 3D sculptures with preserved insects, plants, and taxidermy specimens.[70][71]