Maria Sibylla Merian was a game old bird of entrepreneurial bent, with an overwhelming obsession with insects. Born in Frankfurt in 1647, she sacrificed her health and financial stability in pursuit of her passion. It carried her halfway across the globe and earned her lasting renown among a handful of cognoscenti.
Merian was 15 when Jan Goedart published the first of his three volumes of Metamorphosis et historia naturalis insectorum and is unlikely to have seen the book until later. Goedart’s purpose, based on close observation of a range of insects, was a fuller understanding of insect life cycles. It was the same purpose to which Maria Merian devoted herself — even resorting to selling snakes, lizards, a tortoise and a crocodile to fund her compulsion. Like Goedart and his contemporary Jan Swammerdam, Merian’s published work would explode the belief then current that butterflies and moths burst into life spontaneously rather than through processes of metamorphosis.
Silkworms were her first enthusiasm. Afterwards she focused on ‘the far more beautiful butterflies and moths that developed from caterpillars other than silkworms’, notably those she saw in the Dutch colony of Suriname, on the north-east coast of South America. Surinamese specimens are showcased in her best-known work, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, published in 1705. Hand-coloured plates from the latter, printed on vellum and acquired by George III in the late 1760s, comprise the current exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace.
Merian made no bones that hers was a vocation and she presented herself as a dedicated naturalist. She would claim that, in order to study insect metamorphosis, she ‘withdrew from society and devoted myself to …investigations’; she claimed, too, that her interest in painting arose specifically from entomological curiosity: ‘I wished to become proficient in the skill of painting in order to paint and describe them from life.’
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