Maria Sibylla Merian was a pioneering illustrator and naturalist who combined artistic mastery with scientific inquiry. Born in 1647 in Frankfurt am Main, she was trained in painting and copper engraving by her stepfather, Jacob Marrel. Her fascination with insects began in childhood, and she became one of the first to document their full life cycle, challenging the then-common belief in spontaneous generation of insects.

At 18, she married Johann Andreas Graff and moved to Nürnberg, where she established a successful business teaching painting, selling colors, and illustrating nature. After her stepfather's death, she separated from her husband and returned to Frankfurt with her two daughters. In 1685, she moved to the Netherlands with her mother and daughters, where they lived in a Christian community in West Friesland.

Following her mother's death in 1690, Merian and her daughters moved to Amsterdam. It was there that she encountered exotic specimens from Dutch colonies. In 1699, at the age of 52, she undertook a groundbreaking expedition to Surinam in South America with her younger daughter, studying and illustrating the region’s flora and fauna for nearly two years. This resulted in a compilation of 60 detailed, hand-colored engravings called the “Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium” (1705), which provided new scientific insights into insect metamorphosis and their ecological relationships.

Merian’s work was widely respected during her lifetime, though after her death in 1717, she was gradually forgotten until her rediscovery in the 20th century. Today, she is recognized as a key figure in entomology and scientific illustration, with several species named in her honor. (ss)