Born in Frankfurt to an etcher and book publisher father who died when she was three, Maria Sibylla Merian first studied flower painting with her step-father, Jacob Marrel. She married in 1665 and began her own botanical and entomological work after she and her family moved to Nuremberg in 1670. To facilitate her studies, Merian raised and kept live specimens and was therefore able to show the insects at each stage of their development. Merian left her husband in 1685 and with her children joined a Labadist sect in Frankfurt. In 1699 she traveled with her daughter Dorothea to a Labadist mission in Surinam where she completed a series of paintings detailing the tropical flora and fauna. After a bout with yellow fever, she moved to Amsterdam in 1705 and published a series of engravings from her watercolors in Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium. Merian died in poverty in 1717.