Born In 1647 In Frankfurt,

she was the daughter of engraver Matthäus Merian,

so from early in her life she was antiquated with the work of engraving, following her fathers death she trained with her stepfather, still-life painter Jacob Marrel, it was her self-taught scholarship in the life cycles of insects, however, that set her work apart, Merian’s vivid illustrations portrayed insects in their habitats, showing the link between their lives and the plants in their environments, botanist William T. Stearn writes in Taxon: ‘This perception of their close interrelationship, almost unique when she began, had its origin in her childhood when as a girl in Frankfurt am Main she reared silkworms and watched their development from clusters of eggs to voracious caterpillars, their change into cocoons of silk and the surprising ultimate emergence of moths, with each stage wonderfully different from its predecessor’, 

in 1699, at 52 years old, she finally had the resources and independence to set out on her own scientific expedition to Surinam,there in the South American Dutch colony, accompanied by her daughter Dorothea, she studied the cycles of nature, they returned to Amsterdam in 1701 with watercolors and insect, plant, and animal specimens, “The paintings, tightly sealed in wooden boxes, and the once-living creatures, preserved in jars of brandy, would provide the basis for her greatest artistic achievement, the Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, or Metamorphosis of the Insects of Surinam,” writes art historian Hannah Blumenthal in Gastronomica. “This volume of sixty engraved prints documenting the life cycles of Surinamese insects, each one shown on the plant on which it fed, was published in Amsterdam in 1705.” so who was this remarkable lady?

 Maria Sibylla Merian, much about this publication was revolutionary, in a single illustration, Merian portrayed the whole life of an insect, emphasizing its natural environment at a time when biological study often took place in laboratories and focused on dissection. While her work was recognized by leading scientists of the day, such as naturalist Carl Linnaeus, by the nineteenth century, her reputation started to erode, but in the later half of the twentieth century, Merian rebounded, several new publications revisited her legacy,

and in 1992 she was commemorated on the 500 DM note in Germany, 

photograph by Kristen Grace/Florida Museum, just this month, a new Central American butterfly species was named in her honor, named Catasticta sibyllae, it is a stunning black butterfly with rows of white dots lining its wings and bits of red where they meet the body. Examples have only been identified twice, one in a drawer at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History where it’s been stored since 1981, and the other collected this May in Panama. As Shinichi Nakahara, lead author on its study and a lepidopterist at the Florida Museum of Natural History, stated: “Since this is such a distinctive butterfly, we wanted to name it after someone who would deserve it.” and given the time that she lived in her writing, painting and travelling was an achievement indeed!