Maria Sibylla Merian & Daughters: Women of Art and Science

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Maria Sibylla Merian is one of the most significant seventeenth-century artists of natural history. Her carefully observed records of plants, insects and animals are on display at the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam until May, moving to the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California, in June.

Showing her as both scientist and artist, the exhibition Maria Sibylla Merian & Daughters: Women of Art and Science offers glimpses of Merian's methods, and includes mounted insects in varying states of metamorphosis. The collection is interspersed with paintings and prints by other artists who influenced her, including her stepfather and teacher, Jakob Marrel.

Merian led an unconventional life. Aged 38 and already the author of two books on caterpillars and a three-volume set on flowers, she left her husband and entered a religious commune with her two daughters. Five years later, she and her daughters moved to Amsterdam and established a business selling artists' materials alongside preserved insects and animals.

In 1699, Merian travelled to Suriname (then a Dutch colony) in South America with her youngest daughter, Dorothy, and stayed there for two years to observe and record life in the tropical rainforest. Ill health forced Merian to return to Amsterdam where she published her findings in the Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensis, a breathtaking work. Merian's watercolours from the British Royal Collection (pictured) are also on public display for the first time, and still retain their original brilliant colours.

Credit: ROYAL COLLECTION, HM QUEEN ELIZABETH II