Die Tierwelt der Maria Sibylla Merian

  • Katharina Schmidt-Loske
Basilisken-Presse, €96 3925347798 | ISBN: 3-925-34779-8

Chrysalis

  • Kim Todd
I. B. Tauris £16.99 0151011087 | ISBN: 0-151-01108-7
Credit: TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM

Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) was a woman ahead of her time. Born in Germany into a family of artists and engravers, she worked as an illustrator. She is best known for the paintings she made on a trip to Surinam in 1699. This was well before the more famous male naturalists/explorers such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace travelled the globe, bringing the natural diversity of far-off places to public attention.

Merian was a naturalist from childhood. She made great efforts to depict the life cycle of the animals she drew, often including a key food plant in the picture. The frog illustrated here is from Merian's Drawings of Surinam Insects.

In his Systema naturae, the first taxonomic work describing and naming animal and plant species, Carl Linnaeus mentions Merian's work 136 times.

Two new books tell the story of this remarkable woman. In Die Tierwelt der Maria Sibylla Merian (Basilisken-Presse, €96), Katharina Schmidt-Loske analyses the drawings and watercolours attributed to Merian. Kim Todd's biography Chrysalis (I. B. Tauris, £16.99) brings the life and work of Merian to a wider audience.