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By all accounts, including those written during her own lifetime, Maria Sibylla Merian was a remarkable woman who led an extraordinary life. Born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1647 into the eminent artistic and publishing family of Matthäus Merian the Elder, Maria Sibylla demonstrated an early passion and talent for the subjects that would come to dominate her professional life. As a child she was fascinated by insects, and she raised silkworms in order to observe the stages of their development. She received artistic training in the workshop of her stepfather Jacob Marrel, where she became skilled in the depiction of flowers and other natural subjects, and like many young women of her social group she also learned embroidery and needlework from an early age. She was accomplished enough to offer lessons in these subjects to the daughters of several wealthy families in Nuremberg, where she and her husband Johan Andreas Graf settled in 1670. Merian referred to these students as her “company of maidens,” and she worked with them on several projects that made use of the techniques she devised for colorfast painting on satin, linen, and silk—most notably a tent for an army general who “desired to have his field quarters designed to give him the illusion of living in a garden house full of birds and flowers.”1 It was for her company of maidens and others like them that Merian is believed to have published her Neues Blumenbuch in 1675, the first of a 139 F I V E STITCHES, SPECIMENS, AND PICTURES Maria Sibylla Merian and the Processing of the Natural World three-volume series of floral designs for use as embroidery and needlework patterns , and the first of the artist’s many illustrated publications. Merian was also actively engaged in the study of insects during this early period in Nuremberg, where she developed her unique approach to the visual representation of insect life cycles and collected and traded insect specimens, an activity that would come to serve as an important source of income for her later in life. Merian’s Raupenbuch of 1680 presented innovative illustrations of butterflies, moths, and caterpillars that included picturing the stages of the insects’ life cycles along with their food plants. The Raupenbuch represented the culmination of Merian’s early research on insects and was the first of what would eventually form a three-volume series on European moths and butterflies. The study of insect life cycles, the art of painting and drawing, and the decorative concerns of embroidery and fabric design were the foundations upon which Merian would base her professional and commercial activities and would play an important role in her approach to the natural world over the course of her long and unusual career. In 1685 Merian made a decision that profoundly affected both her personal and professional life. It was in this year that she left her husband and, along with her two daughters and her mother, joined the Labadist religious community at Waltha Castle near Wieuwerd in the Dutch province of Friesland . The Labadists maintained strict rules aimed at providing their members with complete separation from the outside world, and included among their precepts was the belief that marriages within their sect were valid only if both parties were Labadists. Merian never reconciled with her husband Graf, and he later filed for divorce and remarried. Merian and her daughters left the Labadists in 1691 and moved to Amsterdam, where Merian supported her family through the sale of drawings, insect specimens, and art supplies, and by offering lessons in painting and drawing. In 1699 Merian and her daughter Johanna Helena embarked on a journey to the Dutch colony of Surinam in order to observe, collect, and record the life cycles of South American insects. When they returned to Amsterdam in 1701 they brought with them a large number of specimens and drawings that served as the basis of Merian’s most famous work, the Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, published in Amsterdam in 1705. This illustrated volume of sixty copperplate engravings, accompanied by Merian’s written accounts, was the high point of Merian’s artistic career and established her reputation as a gifted artist and naturalist well into the eighteenth century.2 Although Maria Sibylla Merian has been the subject of extensive scholarly research, her far from ordinary life experiences have until recently posed a barrier to understanding the artist within her specific historical context. As Natalie Zemon Davis has shown, the topos of the remarkable...

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