Maria Merian's Butterflies

Maria Sybilla Merian is best known for her Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname, published in 1705 in Dutch and Latin. Readers of Early Modern Womenmay have encountered her as one of the four women Natalie Zemon Davis treats in Women on the Margins. ¹A recent exhibit at the Queen's Gallery of images in the Royal Collection drawn mostly from the Metamorphosisdemonstrates Merian's stunning accomplishment both in natural history and in aesthetic terms, as well as offering insight into the courageous character that enabled her to undertake and complete such a project. ²

Born in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1647, Merian was trained as a watercolorist by her stepfather, who excelled as a flower painter, and most of her early images take flowers as their subject. At eighteen, Merian married an apprentice of her stepfather, yet another watercolor painter. She had two daughters, and in 1679 published her first book on insects: The Wonderful Transformation of Caterpillars and their Particular Plant Nourishment. Although all the organisms depicted in this volume were native to Europe, it makes use of two features that went on to distinguish Merian's later work in the Metamorphosis: each page depicts the different stages in the insect's life cycle as well as the plant on which the insect typically or exclusively feeds. ³

By 1685, Merian had separated from her husband and moved with her mother and two daughters to the northern Netherlands to join a community of Labadists who led a life of austerity, renouncing private possessions. It was probably while she was living there that Merian developed her interest in Suriname. The governor of that Dutch colony from 1683 to 1688 was the brother-in-law of Jean de Labadie and the owner of the castle in the Netherlands in which Merian and her relatives lived during the eighties. A Labadist community had in fact been established in Suriname in 1683 that included the governor's sister.

After the community broke up in 1691, the Merians moved to Amsterdam, where Merian continued to provide for her family through her paintings and engravings. In 1699, at the age of fifty-one, however, she made the extraordinary decision to move to Suriname, accompanied by her younger daughter, in order to observe in the wild the moths and butterflies of the country as they progressed through their stages of life among the native plants on which they lived. In order to fund this work of natural historical research, she sold all of the contents of her studio—her books, paintings, and engraved plates.

In the event, Merian returned to Amsterdam only two years later, her health having been compromised by the climate and, perhaps, by contact with the insects, some of which were poisonous. The result of her researches and the sketches she made in Suriname was the Metamorphosis, published by subscription four years after her return. A second volume, on the reptiles of Suriname, was projected but left incomplete at her death in 1717.

The sixty plates of the Metamorphosisconstitute splendid examples of the engraver's and watercolorist's art. Merian's expertise in printmaking enabled her to target different audiences by producing editions of uncolored or colored plates; counterproof editions (in which partial impressions of prints were hand-colored and in which the orientation was corrected); and prints on vellum which, being less absorbent than paper, reproduces colors in a dazzling manner. One set of these deluxe prints entered the collection of George III (another found its way from the collection of Hans Sloane to the British Museum), and the sixty images in this exhibit come mostly from this edition in the Royal Collection; a few have have been taken from her earlier work, or from the incomplete work on reptiles.

Most of the images in the Metamorphosisand in the exhibit follow the conventions of a print such as "Branch of Pomegranate and Menelaus...