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Europe 1300 - 1800
Course: Europe 1300 - 1800 > Unit 10
Lesson 1: Rococo- A beginner's guide to the Age of Enlightenment
- A beginner's guide to Rococo art
- The Formation of a French School: the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture
- Antoine Watteau, Pilgrimage to Cythera
- Watteau, Pilgrimage to Cythera
- Boucher, Madame de Pompadour
- The Tiepolo Family
- Vigée Le Brun, Self-Portrait with her Daughter, Julie
- Vigée Le Brun, Self-Portrait with her Daughter
- Vigée Le Brun, Self-Portrait
- Vigée Le Brun, Madame Perregaux
- Unlocking an 18th-century French mechanical table
- Bernard II van Risenburgh, Writing table
- Construction of an 18th-century French mechanical table
- The inlay technique of marquetry
- Fragonard, The Swing
- Fragonard, The Swing
- Fragonard, The Swing
- Fragonard, The Meeting
- Greuze, The Village Bride
- Architecture in 18th-century Germany
- Joachim Michael Salecker, Cup with cover with Hebrew inscriptions
- Maria Sibylla Merian, an introduction
- Maria Sybilla Merian's Metamorphosis of a Small Emperor Moth on a Damson Plum: Getty Conversations
- Rococo Art
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Maria Sibylla Merian, an introduction
by The British Museum
Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) came from an artistic family. Her father and two half- brothers were printmakers who successively ran a publishing house of international renown in Frankfurt, and her step-father and husband were painters. She spent major parts of her life in Frankfurt, Nuremberg, and Amsterdam and specialized in painting plants, animals and insects on vellum. In 1699 she travelled with her younger daughter to Surinam, a Dutch colony in South America, where she made extensive notes and sketches, and collected dried plants and animals preserved in alcohol. She returned to Amsterdam in 1701, where in 1705 she published her work on Surinamese insects, the first scientific work produced about the colony.
Merian was an unconventional figure in the late seventeenth century. Few women could have achieved in art and science what she did at that time. For her period, her work is scientifically accurate and she is considered by modern scholars to be one of the founders of entomology, the study of insects.
© The Trustees of the British Museum
Additional resources:
T. Rice, Voyages of discovery: three ce (London, Scriptum Editions and the Natural History Museum, 1999)
K. Wettengl (ed.), Maria Sibylla Merian, 1647-171 (Verlag Gerd Hatje, Frankfurt, 1998)