Character Catalog

Merian's first major work, dedicated to the caterpillars and butterflies of Central Europe, with illustrated plates showing each stage of metamorphosis. It revolutionized descriptive entomology.

A collection of botanical plates featuring meticulously drawn flowers, originally intended for embroiderers and artists. It showcases her dual talent as both scientist and artist.

A scientific and artistic masterpiece published in Amsterdam, presenting 60 color plates of insects, plants, and animals from Suriname. It remained a reference work in tropical entomology for over a century.

A posthumous publication bringing together additional plates on European insects, edited by her daughter Dorothea Maria after Merian's death.

A collection of original watercolor drawings depicting insects and plants from Suriname, remarkable for their exceptional precision and beauty, acquired by the British Crown in the 18th century.

I have observed insects since my youth […] I have represented all of this from nature with their natural colors, so that lovers of such things may come to know them.

I traveled to Surinam […] to observe insects in their natural state, their food sources, their successive metamorphoses, as well as the form of their chrysalises and cocoons.

These plates were drawn and engraved by my own hands, with the greatest care, in order to faithfully represent the nature of the flowers and plants that nourish caterpillars.

I found in Surinam creatures that no European had yet described or depicted; the forest is of a diversity that surpasses all imagination.

Merian's birthplace and a major intellectual and commercial hub where her stepfather Jacob Marrel taught her flower painting and engraving. It was here that she began her first entomological observations.

The scientific and commercial capital of 17th-century Europe, where Merian settled in 1691. She frequented its curiosity cabinets and learned circles, and had her major work published there.

Capital of the colony where Merian stayed from 1699 to 1701. There she observed and illustrated a tropical biodiversity unknown to Europeans, sometimes working with the help of enslaved people and Indigenous Americans.

The village where Merian joined a Pietist community (the Labadists) in 1685. This stay allowed her to break free from her marriage and devote herself more fully to her natural history research.

The city where Merian lived with her husband from 1670 to 1682, and where she published her first entomological works, benefiting from the local network of botanists and naturalists.