The Getty Center features Maria Sibylla Merian and Daughters

Written by Bette Smithfield Tuesday, 27 September 2011 21:27

Los Angeles, CA - This Getty Center exhibition charts the artistic and scientific explorations of German artist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) and her daughters Johanna Helena and Dorothea Maria. Enterprising and adventurous, these women raised the artistic standards of natural history illustration and helped transform the field of entomology, the study of insects. The exhibition presents books, prints, and watercolors by Merian and her contemporaries and features one of the greatest illustrated natural history books of all time, The Insects of Suriname.  On view 10 June through 31 August, 2008.

Predecessors
From about 1450, European artists increasingly took inspiration from nature, studying the details of insects, animals, flowers, and plants. Maria Sibylla Merian enriched this tradition. The creator of this type of drawing, Georg Flegel, had a lasting impact on still life painting in Frankfurt, Merian's native city. Flegel portrayed crawling insects, especially wasps and beetles, with convincing naturalism. In this watercolor, the meticulously rendered hornet is proportionally larger than the ornamental flowers.

Beginnings
 Maria Sibylla Merian was born in 1647 in Frankfurt, Germany, into a middle-class family of publishers and artists. Her father, Matthäus Merian the Elder, published some of the most influential natural history texts of the 1600s. Merian's interest in insects was stimulated by the practice of silkworm breeding that was introduced by Frankfurt's silk trade. She began to observe caterpillars, moths, and butterflies, and by the age of 13 she had already observed the metamorphosis of a silkworm—a discovery that pre-dated published accounts by almost ten years.

The New Book of Flowers
Merian married her stepfather's favorite pupil, Johann Andreas Graff (German, 1636–1701), at the age of 18 and later moved with him to his native Nuremberg. There, she instructed the daughters of respected citizens in embroidery and painting. Merian ingeniously combined her backgrounds in publishing and flower painting to produce The New Book of Flowers, a plate from which is shown here. Comprised of three volumes, each with twelve plates of engravings, this book of flowers, wreaths, nosegays, and bouquets served as a model book for artists, embroiderers on silk, and cabinetmakers. With this function in mind, Merian portrayed each flower in this plate distinctly, without overlap.  Merian's flower books were heavily used and often damaged, and surviving, intact copies such as the one on view in this exhibition are exceedingly rare.

The Caterpillar Book
While in Nuremberg, Merian wrote the first volume of her two-volume book Caterpillars, Their Wondrous Transformation and Peculiar Nourishment from Flowers (or simply The Caterpillar Book). Merian depicted moths and butterflies in various stages of metamorphosis, the process by which they transform from egg to caterpillar to adult. Each image was organized around a single plant and was accompanied by a text in which Merian described the colors, forms, and timing of each stage of transformation. By including the caterpillars' food sources in her natural history illustrations, Merian brought a more ecological approach to the study of metamorphosis.

The Insects of Suriname
Merian's artistic and scientific interests outgrew Amsterdam's supply of exotic plants and animals. In 1699, after selling most of her belongings, she set sail for the Dutch colony of Suriname with her younger daughter, Dorothea Maria. Maria Sibylla was 52, Dorothea Maria 21.

The jungles of South America were teeming with live specimens, which Merian studied for her most important publication, The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname (known as The Insects of Suriname). Merian's experiences in the city of Paramaribo are expressed in her accounts of vibrant butterflies, voracious caterpillars and ants, exotic fruits and vegetables, menacing reptiles, and treacherous explorations into the jungle. Her observations about the local climate, the use of plants and animals, and the Dutch colonists' treatment of slaves provide some of the earliest accounts of life in Suriname.

In 1701, poor health and Suriname's hot and humid climate forced Merian to return to Amsterdam. Her daughter Dorothea Maria probably assisted in making preparatory watercolors for The Insects of Suriname, and an unidentified Amerindian woman who accompanied them home likely provided details about Surinamese plants and animals. The book, published in 1705, was sold in three different versions, including a deluxe version with hand-colored transfer prints that retained the vivid naturalism of Merian's preparatory watercolors.

Spreading the Merian Name
Maria Sibylla Merian died in 1717. Near the time of her death, her watercolors were purchased for Czar Peter the Great of Russia. Shortly thereafter, Dorothea published a third volume of The Caterpillar Book with 50 more of her mother's observations and an appendix on insects observed by Johanna Helena, who had moved to Suriname in 1711.

Around 1718 Dorothea moved to Saint Petersburg, where she continued to work as an artist. To ensure the circulation of her mother's work, she sold the plates of The Insects of Suriname to a Dutch publisher, who reissued the book in 1719 with 12 additional plates. Thanks to her daughters' continued diligence, Merian left a lasting mark on entomology.

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