Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that answer the question.
Query: Where was Maria Sibylla Merian born?
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.
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]
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]
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]
Timeline of women in science
The title page of her 1679 Caterpillars proudly proclaimed in German:
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]
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]
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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.
Gsell was born in St. Gallen where he married his first wife in 1697, Marie Gertrud von Loen of Frankfurt am Main. They moved to Amsterdam in 1704 where their fifth daughter Katharina was born in 1707. His wife died and he remarried Anna Horstmans, but divorced her in 1715, when he married a third time to Dorothea Maria Merian, the daughter of Maria Sibylla Merian. The couple was recruited by Peter the Great in 1716 and went to Russia, where he became first curator of the Imperial art gallery founded in 1720. His wife, Maria-Dorothea, became the curator of the Kunstkamera. Their daughter Katharina married mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1733.
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.
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.
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]
The specific name, "merianae", is in honor of German-born naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian.
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 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]
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 2018 a rare butterfly, Catasticta sibyllae was named after her.[62][63]
The younger Basel line includes a Frankfurt sub-branch founded by the engraver Matthäus Merian the Elder (1593-1650), whose descendants became artists during the Baroque period and ran what became one of Europe's largest publishers in the 17th century. Matthäus Merian's daughter was the naturalist and artist Maria Sibylla Merian.
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]
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.
Merian first made a name for herself as an botanical artist. In 1675 she started to publish a three volume series, each with 12 plates depicting flowers.[22] In 1680 she published Neues Blumenbuch, combining the series.[23]
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]