Artist who braved pirates and jungles gets her star turn

More than a century before Darwin’s voyages, a 17th-century female artist and naturalist braved pirates and unexplored jungles in South America to create an illustrated natural history of Suriname.
While there has been a recent surge in the popularity of her beautiful drawings as decorative art, the groundbreaking work of Maria Sibylla Merian, who was born in 1647 and died in 1717, and her early voyage of biological discovery, has been long overlooked.
Now a first edition of her 1705 work Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, one of only 60 copies left in existence, has gone on display in Amsterdam, the city of her birth, having been bought by the Dutch national Rijksmuseum for €200,000.
Her interest — unusual for a woman in her day — in the study of insects and plants had begun at a young age. She bred caterpillars and made sketches of the pupation phase and the plants on which the butterflies lived.
This exploration of metamorphosis was revolutionary, because at the time insects were widely believed to develop magically via “spontaneous generation” from mud or plants. Merian was the first person to record the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly in its natural habitat.
Her later drawings in Suriname, then a Dutch colony, detailed her own discoveries as well as the accounts of native South Americans and slaves. “This book’s artistic quality and innovative scientific approach make for a work whose every aspect connects with the stories we want to tell,” said Alex Alsemgeest, the curator of the Rijksmuseum’s library collections.
“The book notably contains descriptions of the circumstances in which she collected information, revealing that Merian drew on the knowledge of enslaved people and the original inhabitants of Suriname. Merian mentions in the introduction that she retained the names of plants as they were given by the indigenous population.”
Against the advice of her friends, and the danger of pirates, Merian, a single, divorced woman, had sold her studio and in 1699 travelled with her youngest daughter Dorothea Graff to Suriname, then Dutch Guiana, after it was captured from Britain in 1667.
On arrival, she infuriated Dutch colonists, who used Indian or African slaves on their sugar, indigo and cotton plantations, who “laughed at me for seeking anything other than sugar”, she wrote.
In her account of the Flos pavonis, or peacock flower, she painted a stark picture by explaining how badly treated slaves used the plant’s seeds “to abort their children, not wanting their children to be slaves, like them”, or to take their own lives.
“The black slaves from Guinea and Angola have demanded to be well treated, threatening to refuse to have children,” she wrote. “In fact, they sometimes take their own lives because they are treated so badly, and because they believe they will be born again, free and living in their own land. They told me this themselves.”