Maria Sibylla Merian, Women’s Artistic Practices, and Networks of Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Germany

During her early career in Germany, artist and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) instructed young women in painting and embroidery. Most researchers have treated these students as peripheral to Merian’s research into insect metamorphosis. This essay demonstrates that, to the contrary, Merian’s female pupils in Frankfurt and Nuremberg were a valuable network for intellectual and material exchange. Merian leveraged her students’ family ties to forge connections with male scholars and natural history enthusiasts. She further sought and obtained insect specimens from her female students through norms of gift exchange associated with early modern patronage and sociability. A deeper consideration of these student-teacher relationships yields a more nuanced view of the relationship between patronage and commercialism in Merian’s career as a naturalist and illuminates the need for historians of science to attend to women’s artistic production as a network-building practice.