The Girl Who Drew Butterflies: How Maria Merian’s Art Changed Science by Joyce Sidman (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018)

The Girl Who Drew Butterflies is considered a children’s book, but that misleading designation should not lead adults to avoid reading it. It has a plethora of wonderful illustrations, but that only makes it all the more rewarding to read.

Maria Sibylla Merian was born in Frankfurt, Germany on April 2, 1647, to a family of printers and engravers. Her mother’s new husband specialized in painting flowers, which meant that Maria grew up in a household filled with plants. Of course, included with the plants were insects: beetles, wasps, and bees. Maria was charged with capturing insects so that her stepfather could add them to his paintings.

In the 1600s, people still regarded Aristotle as the expert on all living things. He had declared, two thousand years earlier, that insects came from “dew, dung, dead animals, or mud.” Insects were considered evil, labelled an “abomination” in the Bible. But Maria, who sought insects to include in her own paintings and engravings, was intrigued.

Maria first turned to silkworms, discovering that white moths crept from the cocoons. She noticed that the caterpillars themselves came from eggs. In 1679, at the age of 13, she created an engraving that illustrated the entire lifecycle of the silkworm.

Sidman’s account records details of Maria’s transformation from a curious child to a young woman raising a family and also publishing her own work on flowers, work that always included insects. Maria continued to raise caterpillars from eggs and observe the creatures that emerged from the cocoons. She became a self-taught scientist, gathering specimens, recording the plants they lived on, and watching their transformation. And the early focus on flowers with insects progressed to insects on flowers.

Sidman provides us with details of Maria’s life and career and she provides photographs and drawings that show Maria’s drawings and publications as well as the butterflies and moths themselves, including their metamorphoses. I especially appreciated the beautiful photograph of the Red Admiral on pg 94, a butterfly that regularly appears in my native flower garden.

Perhaps most amazing in this account of Maria Merian’s life is her voyage to Surinam, in South America. In 1699 she traveled with her younger daughter halfway round the world, financed by selling 250 paintings. “She rented a house, cultivated a large garden, and plunged into the work of discovering and breeding caterpillars.” She worked closely with native people to learn about and collect native flowers and insects, sketching them in her notebooks, pressing the flowers, and preserving the caterpillars in brandy. She returned home in 1701 with an incredible wealth of knowledge of a largely unexplored area.

Sidman lavishly provides illustrations from the book that Maria and her children created after they returned from Surinam. Maria’s work was acknowledged by the Royal Society of London. Carl Linnaeus relied heavily on her work in naming insects. At the same time, she was criticized by the largely male emerging scientific authorities, who claimed that she could not have done all this work herself.

I strongly recommend this book, not only for yourself but for your children. It is a beautiful tribute to an extraordinary woman who revolutionized our understanding of the insect world.