. Brafman

The artist and scientist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) was born in Frankfurt, Germany, into a middle-class family of publishers and artists. With her meticulous depictions of insect metamorphosis, she raised the standards of natural history illustration and helped give birth to the field of entomology. At the age of fifty-two, Merian travelled with her younger daughter to Suriname, a Dutch...