In 1699 a fifty two year old widow sold most of her paintings, borrowed money, obtained a small grant from the city of Amsterdam, and sailed to Surinam with her younger daughter to study insects. She had no institution behind her, no patron paying for the voyage and no husband travelling with her. She had arranged the whole thing herself.
Nobody had done this before. Naturalists went abroad as ship’s surgeons, as chaplains, as guests of trading companies or as employees of a crown. Maria Sibylla Merian went as herself, funded by her own work.
Learning the Trade in Frankfurt
She was born in Frankfurt in 1647 into the family business. Her father, Matthäus Merian the Elder, was one of the great engravers and publishers of the century, and although he died when she was three, the workshop remained. Her mother married Jacob Marrel, a still life and flower painter, who trained his stepdaughter properly: drawing, watercolour, engraving, and the preparation of plates.
This matters because it means she was a trained professional in a craft, not a gifted amateur. Women were excluded from the painters’ guilds and from working in oils, so she worked in watercolour and gouache on vellum, which was categorised as decorative rather than serious art. It also happens to be a superb medium for small precise subjects.
From the age of thirteen she kept caterpillars. She fed them, watched them, recorded what they ate and drew what happened to them. She was doing this decades before she published anything about it.
The Question She Was Actually Answering
It is difficult now to appreciate how strange insects were in the seventeenth century.
The prevailing view, inherited from Aristotle and still widely held, was that small creatures could arise spontaneously from mud, dung, dew or rotting matter. Insects were commonly called beasts of the devil, and there was no accepted account linking a caterpillar to the butterfly it becomes: they were often treated as different creatures entirely.
Merian’s answer was to put the whole sequence on one page. Her plates show the egg, the caterpillar at successive stages, the pupa, and the adult insect, all together, arranged on and around the specific plant the caterpillar feeds on.
That composition is the innovation, and it carries two scientific claims. The first is that these are one organism at different stages of a single life, which is an argument against spontaneous generation made entirely in pictures. The second is that the insect and the plant belong together, because that particular caterpillar eats that particular species and nothing else.
Nobody was drawing them that way. Contemporary practice was to show dead specimens isolated on blank paper, arranged by size or by type, pinned and disconnected from anything living. Merian drew relationships. That is why she is now read as an early ecologist rather than only as an illustrator, and it is a fair reading: the information her plates encode is not just what a thing looks like but what it does and where it does it.
Her two volumes on European caterpillars, published in 1679 and 1683 under the title Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandelung, the wondrous transformation of caterpillars, contained a hundred and eighty six observed life cycles. She wrote them in German rather than Latin, deliberately, so that they could be read by people who were not scholars.
Leaving
In the mid 1680s she left her husband, took her two daughters and her mother, and joined a strict Protestant community of Labadists in Friesland. Her husband’s attempts to retrieve her were refused by the community, and she eventually described herself as a widow while he was still alive.
The Labadist connection had one unexpected scientific consequence. The community owned a plantation in Surinam, and its collections included preserved tropical insects and plants from there. Merian saw them, found them extraordinary, and found the way they had been collected useless: dead specimens with no information about what they ate, what they turned into or where they lived.
She moved to Amsterdam in 1691 and spent eight years building a reputation, selling paintings, dealing in specimens and teaching. Then she liquidated the lot and bought passage to Paramaribo.
Two Years in Surinam
She arrived in 1699 with her daughter Dorothea and stayed until 1701, cutting the trip short because of malaria, which very likely shortened her life.
What she did there was field entomology under genuinely hostile conditions: rearing tropical insects through their life cycles in a climate that rots paper and pigment, travelling into forest, and relying on the knowledge of indigenous people and enslaved Africans, whom she credits in her text in a way her contemporaries usually did not. They told her the local names of plants, what was edible, and what each was used for, and she wrote it down.
She was also blunt about the colony. The Dutch planters, she noted, cared about nothing but sugar, and mocked her for looking at anything other than a cash crop. She recorded that the enslaved and indigenous women used the seeds of the peacock flower to induce abortion, so that their children would not be born into slavery, and that they told her this directly. That passage is among the earliest European records of the practice and she reports it without editorial softening.
The Book, 1705
Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium appeared in Amsterdam in 1705, sixty large plates, published at her own expense in Latin and Dutch, with the copperplates engraved from her watercolours and many copies coloured by hand in her workshop by her and her daughters.
It is a strange and magnificent object. The insects are life size. The compositions are dense, sometimes several species interacting on one plant. The plate everybody remembers shows a large spider consuming a hummingbird.
That image was ridiculed for the best part of two centuries as fantasy, an example of a woman exaggerating for effect. It also gave the bird eating spiders their genus name, Avicularia, taken directly from her picture. In the twentieth century the behaviour was observed and photographed. She was right, and the mockery says more about her critics than about her.
Not everything in the book is correct. A few plates place insects on plants they do not use, some scenes are composites assembled from separate observations, and a handful of identifications are wrong. Nineteenth century naturalists seized on these errors and her reputation collapsed accordingly, which had the convenient effect of removing a woman from the founding literature of a discipline that was busy professionalising itself.
What Was Built on It
When Linnaeus built the system that names every living thing, he used her plates as type material. Around a hundred species were described on the basis of Merian’s illustrations, and he cites the Metamorphosis repeatedly. For a good number of tropical insects, the original scientific description in the binomial system rests on a picture she painted.
Her argument against spontaneous generation also held, although it took a long time to finish the job. The idea survived for insects and then retreated to microorganisms, where it was finally killed off in the 1860s when Pasteur’s flask experiments removed the last refuge for it. Merian’s caterpillars were the same argument, made with a paintbrush, a hundred and eighty years earlier.
Peter the Great bought a large collection of her originals, which is why so many are in St Petersburg, and Dorothea went there to work. Merian died in Amsterdam in 1717, registered as a pauper, having spent everything she earned on producing her own books.
A century later Humboldt would take the same approach to South America and be celebrated for inventing it: observe the organism where it lives, record the relationships, publish the pictures at your own expense. He had the advantage of a fortune, an era that wanted to hear it, and no guild telling him what he was allowed to paint in.
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