Art and science meet in the garden. Plants were perhaps the first object of man’s curiosity, and women have long been at the forefront of that inquiry. Maria Sibylla Merian, who with her daughter left Europe for Suriname in 1699 to study and draw the metamorphosis of insects (and their relationship to their floral habitat), stands at the beginning of a series of women as scholars, artists, patrons and collectors through to the modern era. Using books, prints and watercolors as our guide, we’ll explore how these pioneering women advanced science and art alike to deepen our engagement with the natural world.
Jonah Rosenberg is the Head of Rare books at Arader Galleries on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Trained as a “Classicist” (A.B., Brown; D.Phil, Oxford), Jonah has been in the rare book trade for a dozen years or so, following a roughly equal period as professor of art history at Oxford as well as in the U.S. Arader is a specialist in richly-illustrated books in the fields of cartography, Americana, exploration and natural history; as well as in maps (Jonah was recently elected president of the New York Map Society) and natural history watercolors.
