Merian Botanical Aurum® 24k Gold Series Set

Celebrate the extraordinary naturalist, explorer, and scientific artist Maria Sibylla Merian with this collection of illustrations from her groundbreaking studies of exotic plants and insects. Merian’s renderings are not only impeccable in their scientific clarity, but through her observations, she contradicted the commonly held ideas of the day that insects developed through spontaneous generation. Credited as the first person to record the process of metamorphosis in insects, Maria Sibylla Merian is recognized as one of the most influential scientists of the Enlightenment. Her method of classification for butterflies and moths is used today.

A true pioneer, Merian broke with tradition and established new standards in numerous areas of scientific enquiry. At a time when women were relegated to purely domestic lives, she was entirely independent. With her two artistically trained daughters, Merian made a living by running her own business: an art and scientific research studio. In order to study her subjects empirically in their natural environment, which had never been done, she sold her entire stock of art and specimens for the money to secure passage to colonial Dutch Suriname. The greatest legacy of her trip is the body of art and scientific discovery in which it resulted. Additionally significant was Merian’s rejection of convention in traveling without a trusted male escort, and it was the first scientific research trip at that time to be entirely self-funded.

Born in Frankfurt in 1647, Maria Sibylla Merian grew up in a family of artists and printmakers. She learned the arts of painting and engraving from her stepfather, the still-life artist Jacob Marrel. At the age of 13, Merian began to collect and study insects, intrigued by the changes that insects underwent in their lives. Her curiosity about the natural world would not only become a lifelong fascination but would provide her with a groundbreaking career. She went on to observe and record the life cycles of many species of insects and amphibians, nearly 200 in total.

Originally published in 1705 in Dutch and Latin, Merian’s Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium was the first documentation of the natural history of Suriname. The artist created 60 engravings, illustrating the life cycle of insect development in context with cultivated and wild plants of the region. Her compositions of insects in their habitats were revolutionary creations that changed the course of natural science. Her practice of direct observation, recording the stages of metamorphosis in a single illustration, and depicting the complete environment became the standard for natural history illustrations: to combine insects with the plants on which they fed, thereby illustrating and clarifying these important ecological relationships.