Study of Capers, Gorse, and a Beetle

This delicately rendered study of a caper, gorse, and bright red beetle, is the work of Maria Sibylla Merian, a prolific, watercolorist, printmaker, teacher, and naturalist, most remembered for her attentive, empirically observed, studies of plants, and the metamorphosis of the insects that dwelled and fed on them. Merian published several landmark printed books that presented her ecological study of insects in their habitat both in Europe and in the then Dutch colony of Surinam.[1].


Merian painted this work in 1693, while she lived in Amsterdam. She and her daughters produced and sold a large number of autonomous watercolor paintings in the early 1690s often intended for collection in albums. Six years after the drawing in the Met’s collection was painted, Merian and her youngest daughter, Dorothea Maria Gsell neé Graff (1648–1743) would undertake a costly journey to Surinam. The Met sheet was likely executed for sale to raise funds for that upcoming journey.


In addition to being an artist and naturalist, Merian was a businesswoman and the head of a workshop. The Met drawing is an important document of the savvy with which the workshop transformed images between media to target new audiences. The caper and gorse in this drawing first appeared in plate 10 of the third volume of Merian’s early printed florilegium, das neues Blumenbuch (Florum Fasciculus Tertius...), published in 1680. The Met’s watercolor does not reproduce the printed design directly. Instead, Merian spaces the two flowers further apart on the sheet, and adds details to individualize the specimens, such as the touch of decay on the bottommost leaf on the left side of the gorse stem. This drawing transforms a print that would have served as an embroidery design into a composition more attuned to the visual idiom of the plant album, and suitable for a new audience: collectors of drawings.[2] Merian’s daughter Johanna Helena Herolt (1668–1723), painted these two flowers five years later in 1698. The drawing survives in an album in the Anton Ulrich Museum in Braunschweig [3]. Johanna Helena also made modifications, combining the two flowers with a third of a different species, resulting in a novel composition built from familiar building blocks. The economical use of existing imagery seen in the Met drawing is a hallmark of the Merian workshop.

While this flower study may not have been intended to serve an overtly scientific function — it is not accompanied by any descriptive text in das Blumenbuch, and the red beetle unique to the Met drawing is so cursorily observed that it cannot be identified — Merian still maintained the attention to details of the plants’ appearance that characterized her empirical work. Technical analysis has shed some light on the nuances of Merian’s treatment of color. Analysis with fiber optic reflectance spectroscopy (FORS) and x-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy distinguished two different reds in the drawing, vivid vermilion and an organic red lake.[4] She used Vermilion to paint the muted reds of the underside of the white caper flower, and the red lake was used in the pink stamens emerging from the center of the caper blossom. Due to the fugitivity of the pigment over time the stamens now appear quite muted in tone, but once may have been more vivid, a reference to the bright purple color of real caper stamens. The drawing demonstrates Merian’s quite subtle sensitivity to the color of botanical subjects and her investment in recreating these colors in artworks.

Olivia Dill 8/20/24




[1] On ecology in Merian’s work see Kay Etheridge, the Flowering of Ecology: Maria Sibylla Merian’s Caterpillar Book, The Flowering of Ecology (Boston: Brill, 2020).

[2] Janice Neri, The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 139-180

[3] Johanna Helena Herolt, Zweige eines Ginsters, eines Echten Kapernstrauches und einer Kardinalsblume, 1698, gouache and gum arabic on prepared parchment, 37.7cm x 30.4 cm, Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig, Z 6508.

[4] XRF spectroscopy was conducted by Associate Research Scientists in the Department of Scientific Research, Alicia McGeachy and Elena Basso. FORS analysis was conducted by Alicia McGeachy.