Insects & Flowers : The J. Paul Getty Museum : 9780892369294 : 0892369299 : 21 Aug 2008 : The artist and scientist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) was born in Frankfurt, Germany, into a middle-class family of publishers and artists. With her meticulous depictions of insect metamorphosis, she raised the standards of natural history illustration and helped give birth to the field of entomology. At the age of fifty-two, Merian traveled with her younger daughter to Suriname, a Dutch territory in South America, to paint its exotic flora and fauna. Many of the drawings produced by Merian in the South American jungle were later published as hand-colored counterproofs in her book Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname (1705), which brought her widespread fame. A copy of the second edition is held in the collections of the Research Library at the Getty Research Institute. Insects and Flowers, a book that reproduces color details of sixteen plates from the Getty's copy, is a vibrant encapsula