Works by Maria Sibylla Merian

Maria Sibylla Merian raised caterpillars to see what they would turn into, and many of her plates set larvae, pupae and winged insects together on one plant.

In 1699, aged fifty-two, Merian sailed for Suriname with her younger daughter, selling her own paintings to pay for the voyage. She sketched there for two years, wrote down the local names of plants, and came home in 1701 after an illness, possibly malaria. Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium followed in 1705, with sixty plates after her designs; this time hired engravers cut the copper, and a name such as P. Sluyter sits small at the foot of a double pink and a double white flower. On plate 9 a pomegranate splits open below its red blossoms, and one large butterfly is shown twice, from above in shining blue and from below in brown with eyespots.

Long before that she had engraved and etched every plate of her caterpillar books of 1679 and 1683 herself. She drew from live insects so that their colours would be true, and showed both faces of a wing. Her pairings are often wrong: the caterpillars in Caterpillars, Butterflies and Flower belong to a different species from the moths beside them, though Merian took them for one. A 1730 leaf from her book of European insects holds four small plates, with hyacinths, narcissi and a crown imperial among caterpillars, butterflies and a moth. Nearly everything below comes from her books: the caterpillar volumes, the Suriname book, and editions of both printed after she died in 1717.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Biodiversity Heritage Library, contributed by Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, Minneapolis Institute of Art. Portrait: Jacob Marrel.