Dorothea Maria Graff

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Dorothea Maria Graff (baptized February 2, 1678 July in Nuremberg ; died May 5, 1743 July in St. Petersburg ) was a flower and insect painter, copper engraver , academy teacher and curator . She was the younger daughter of Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) and thus belonged to the younger Frankfurt line of the Merian family in Basel . She and her mother spent two years in Suriname , where they both studied insects and reptiles in their tropical habitat.

Maria Sibylla Merian formed a community of artists together with her two daughters Johanna Helena Graff (1668–1723) and Dorothea Maria Graff. In recent years, a number of images previously attributed to Maria Sibylla Merian have been identified as works by her daughter Dorothea Maria Graff. Dorothea Maria Graff was known by different names in the course of her life. For a while she had her mother's surname (Dorothea Maria Merian). During their marriages, their names were Hendriks or Gsell. After moving to Russia, she was "the Gsellscha".

Life

Crocodile caiman with coral roller snake (1705–1717); originally attributed to Maria Sibylla Merian , since 1997 assigned to Dorothea Maria Gsell

Childhood and youth

Dorothea Maria Graff was born in Nuremberg in 1678 as the daughter of the artist couple Maria Sibylla Merian and Johann Andreas Graff (1636–1701). At this point in time, the couple already had a ten-year-old daughter (Johanna Helena). Dorothea Graff's childhood was marked by many changes of location: In 1681 Maria Sibylla Merian left her husband and moved with her two daughters to her mother in Frankfurt am Main . The father moved in, but four years later the separation of the parents was final. Maria Sibylla Merian joined the early Pietist sect of the Labadists , who lived in Wieuwerd in the Dutch province of Friesland , together with her mother and daughters . After her mother's death, Merian left the Labadists and settled in Amsterdam with her daughters in 1691 . Merian and Graff's marriage was divorced in 1692.

During this time, Maria Sibylla Merian developed a new artistic form that combined art with natural science and created a style. As a result of her long-term studies, one year after Dorothea's birth, she published the first caterpillar book: The caterpillars wonderful transformation and strange flower food . Two years later, Merian's second caterpillar book was published in Frankfurt am Main.

Dorothea and Johanna Graff were trained in watercolors and copperplate engraving by their mother . In Amsterdam, the three women established a joint painting studio for flower pictures and other botanical subjects. As a recognized natural scientist, Merian was given access to the natural history cabinets , greenhouses and orangeries in the homes of wealthy citizens, such as the collector of tropical plants Agnes Block . She read carefully the newly published books on her specialty, entomology , and compared them with the results of her own studies. In addition, she painted flowers and birds for wealthy nature lovers; She supplemented existing plant images with images of flies, beetles and butterflies. In all of these activities she was supported by her growing daughters.

Trip to Suriname

In February 1699 Merian sold a large part of her collections and her paintings to finance a trip to Suriname. In April she deposited a will with an Amsterdam notary , in which she designated her daughters as universal heirs. In June 1699 she and her then 21-year-old daughter Dorothea Maria boarded a merchant sailing ship that took them to Surinam. Initially starting from the state capital Paramaribo , later from the Labadist community Providentia , 65 km away , where they lived with the Pietist community, the two women went on excursions into the inaccessible primeval forests . There they observed, drew or collected everything they could discover about the tropical insects. Their classification of butterflies in daytime and moths (of them referred to as "bands" and "owls") is valid until today. They took plant names from the language used by the Indians . After two years in Suriname, the 54-year-old mother fell ill with malaria . The two women then began their return journey. They returned to Amsterdam on September 23, 1701.

Amsterdam

A few months after returning from Suriname, Dorothea Graff married on December 2, 1701 a surgeon from Heidelberg named Philip Hendriks, whom she probably met in Suriname. After the marriage, the couple lived with Merian. Two children in this marriage died young. Mother and daughter jointly ran a company to manufacture and sell Merian's prints and paintings. Some of the works came from Dorothea Hendriks. Philip Hendriks brought back samples from trips to the tropics, including snakes. Drawings of these snakes show them in a seemingly natural environment. Their poses were artistically pleasing, but not scientifically correct. It is believed that these drawings are by Dorothea Hendriks.

In 1711 the older sister Johanna went to Surinam with her husband. Dorothea's husband died that same year, and she subsequently took her mother's name, Merian, presumably for business reasons. In 1713 and 1714 Mother and Daughter published Volumes 1 and 2 of the work Der rupsen begin, voedsel en wonderbaare veranderingen . The work appeared under the name of the mother, but according to the current state of research, some of the published engravings are from the daughters Johanna and Dorothea.

In 1714 Maria Sibylla Merian had a stroke that partially paralyzed her; Her health seems to have been worse since 1712, so that she was hardly able to work. The works that were created during this time are probably by her daughter Dorothea. After her mother's death in 1717, Dorothea Merian published the third volume of the caterpillar book.

St. Petersburg

After her mother's death, Dorothea Merian was in a difficult situation because she could no longer sell pictures under her mother's name. A long-time friend and possibly housemate, the widowed Swiss painter Georg Gsell , father of five children, was in a similarly difficult situation. Shortly before, he had divorced his second wife. During a visit by Tsar Peter I in 1716/1717 to Amsterdam, Georg Gsell acted as his art advisor. He was commissioned to bring the Tsar's purchases to Russia. Dorothea Merian married Georg Gsell at the end of 1717. The couple sold as much of Maria Sibylla Merian's work as possible and then moved to St. Petersburg. Georg Gsell became court painter and Dorothea Gsell became a teacher at the Academy of Sciences and Arts in St. Petersburg and curator of the natural history collection Kunstkamera , which also contained her own works. In 1736 she traveled to Amsterdam to buy her mother's works for the collection.

The Gsell couple had three sons (born between 1718 and 1722) and their daughter Salome Abigail, born in 1723, who married the mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1776 . He had previously been married to Salome's half-sister Katharina, Gsell's daughter from his first marriage, who had died in 1773. Georg Gsell died in 1740 and Dorothea Gsell in 1743 in St. Petersburg. As far as is known, their descendants remained in Russia.

plant

As a rule, Dorothea and Johanna Graff did not sign their works, Merian himself rarely did either. Many of the daughters' works appeared under the mother's name. Dorothea's specialties were reptiles and amphibians. Compared to her mother's work, Dorothea's compositions are stiffer and are often dominated by a plant that is prominently placed upright or diagonally. It also fills out very precise areas, but in a coarser way than Merian.

Together with her husband, Dorothea Gsell trained an important group of Russian artists, which included Pyotr Pagin, Mihail Nekrasow, Ivan Sheresperov and Andrei Grekov. Her husband taught her oil painting, while Dorothea Gsell taught her drawing and watercolor. With her work for the art camera she made a significant contribution to the development of Russian science and art.

literature

  • Natalie Zemon Davis : Metamorphoses. The life of Maria Sibylla Merian. Wagenbach Verlag, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-8031-2484-0 .
  • Renée E. Kistemaker, Natalya P. Kopaneva, Debora J. Meijers, Georgy Vilinbakhov (Eds.) The Paper Museum of the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg c. 1725-1760 . Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam 2005, ISBN 90-6984-426-5 .
  • Jordana Pomeroy, Rosalind P. Blakesley, Vladimir Yu. Matveyev, Elizaveta P. Renne (Eds.) An imperial collection. Women artists from the State Hermitage Museum . National Museum of Women in the Arts, London 2003. ISBN 1-85894-198-9 .
  • Ella Reitsma: Maria Sibylla Merian & Daughters. Women of Art and Science. Waanders Publishers, Zwolle 2008, ISBN 978-0-89236-937-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Natalie Zemon Davis: Metamorphoses. The life of Maria Sibylla Merian. Wagenbach Verlag, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-8031-2484-0 . P. 16 and p. 135, footnote 3.
  2. ↑ Ella Reitsma: Maria Sibylla Merian & Daughters. Women of Art and Science. Waanders Publishers, Zwolle 2008, ISBN 978-0-89236-937-9 . P. 55.
  3. ↑ Reitsma 2008, p. 32.
  4. ↑ Reitsma 2008, p. 200
  5. ↑ Dorothea Maria Graff at geneanet.org
  6. ↑ Reitsma 2008, pp. 226-227.
  7. ↑ Natalie Zemon Davis: Metamorphoses . In: Kurt Wettengl (Ed.): Maria Sibylla Merian. Artist and naturalist 1647 - 1717 . Hatje, Ostfildern-Ruit 1997, ISBN 3-7757-0723-9 , p. 176-201. Here p. 199 .
  8. ↑ Reitsma 2008, p. 232.
  9. ↑ Reitsma 2008, p. 235.
  10. ↑ Davis 1997, pp. 200-201.
  11. ↑ Reitsma 2008, p. 236.
  12. ↑ Reitsma 2008, p. 237.
  13. ↑ Leonhard Euler - descendants of Maria Sibylla Merian and her son-in-law Georg Gsell - Geneanet. Retrieved April 16, 2017 .
  14. ↑ Georg Gsell - descendants of Maria Sibylla Merian and her son-in-law Georg Gsell - Geneanet. Retrieved April 16, 2017 .
  15. ↑ Erik Amburger Database - Foreigners in Pre-Revolutionary Russia. Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Research, accessed on May 13, 2020 .
  16. ↑ Reitsma 2008, p. 34.
  17. ↑ Reitsma 2008, p. 214.
  18. ↑ Reitsma 2008, p. 237.
  19. ^ Elisabeth Castellani Zahir: SIKART Lexicon on Art in Switzerland on Dorothea Maria Graff. 1998, Retrieved April 15, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Graff, Dorothea Maria
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Graff, Dorothea Maria Henriette (full name); Hendriks, Dorothea Maria (married name); Gsell, Dorothea Maria (married name); Merian, Dorothea Maria (stage name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Naturalist and artist
DATE OF BIRTH February 2, 1678
PLACE OF BIRTH Nuremberg
DATE OF DEATH May 5, 1743
Place of death St. Petersburg