File:Drawing, album (BM SL,5275.18).jpg
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Captions
Captions
Summary
[edit]drawing, album
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| Artist |
Drawn by: Johanna Herolt (? or)
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| Title |
drawing, album |
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| Description |
English: Branch of a defoliated guava tree with tarantulas, ants and spiders, from an album of 91 drawings entitled 'Merian's Drawings of Surinam Insects &c'; a tarantula emerging from a nest, another consuming a hummingbird, with eggs nearby, on a branch with a guava fruit
Watercolour and bodycolour, heightened with white, on vellum |
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| Date | 1701-1705 (circa) | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Medium | vellum | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Dimensions |
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| Collection |
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| Current location |
Prints and Drawings |
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| Accession number |
SL,5275.18 |
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| Notes |
The quality of this drawing is noticeably inferior to a sheet drawn in bodycolour over light counterproof of the same composition, but of larger dimensions, in the Royal Collection, Windsor, RL 21172 (illustrated in S.Owen, 'Amazing Rare Things: the Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery', London, 2007, pl.58; and in Print Quarterly, xxxiii, no.2, 2016, p.182, in a review of Mark Laird, 'English Gardening 1650-1800,) after which it must have been made. This is especially marked in the treatment of the insects, the tarantula's egg and the guava, and the three-dimensional effect of light and shade which is strikingly more sophisticated in the Windsor sheet. It is very likely that this sheet was drawn by eitherJohanna Herolt or Dorothea Graff, the daughters of Maria Sibylla Merian, after her design. In the commentary to this sheet in the Folio Society facsimile of the Surinam Album (London, 2006), J. Harvey notes: 'This watercolour presents a busy scene of spiders and ants on a branch of the Brazilian Guava, Psidium guineense (Swartz; see also watercolour 19 and 57). Merian noted “I have found the largest spiders on the Guava trees”. The spider shown top right in the centre of a web is probably Heteropoda venatoria (Linnaeus), common names include huntsman spider, and the giant crab spider; it has a leg span of between 7 and 12 cm. This female is shown carrying a typical disc-like egg sac which contains about 200 eggs. This spider has a wide distribution in the tropics and is valued as they catch and feed on cockroaches and other insect pests. This species is incorrectly depicted at the centre of a web; in fact it does not use a web to capture prey, instead relying on agility and stealth. The two larger spiders are the Pinktoe Tarantula Avicularia avicularia (Linnaeus), the common name derives from the pink colouration to the tips of the legs. Found in northern South America it is a tree living species, which in addition to invertebrate prey, is said occasionally to take small vertebrates and even birds. Merian drew the Tarantula feeding on a humming-bird, and wrote “They take small birds from their nests and suck all the blood from their bodies”. She was later ridiculed by zoologists such as Hermann Burmeister for this observation, which he thought was incredible. It is interesting to note that Henry Walter Bates did record a large spider killing a small bird in his work, 'A Naturalist on the River Amazons', 1863.' Additional information: The ants shown here attacking the spiders were considered by Harvey to be leaf-cutter ants, Atta cephalotes, which Merian noted “can eat whole trees bare as a broom handle in a single night”.' Renate von Kries has pointed out (email, August 2009) that the leaves shown here have certainly been eaten by Atta cephalotes, but Merian has actually depicted a different type of ant, Atta ecitonini, or wandering ants which feed off spiders and other insects (leaf-cutter ants do not eat insects). Merian mentions Atta ecitonini later in her text: 'These ants are inimical to spiders and all insects in the country. They come in big numbers inside houses running from one room to another and kill all the animals big and small'. Atta cephalotes has a much broader head than Atta ecitonini, with very large jaws which move all the time to cut leaves. Such a feature is not visible on the ants here. For details, see K. Schmidt-Loske, 'Die Tierwelt der Maria Sibylla Merian', Marburg, 2007, p. 81ff, np. 6.2.1.1 (and her earlier dissertation, 'Die naturwissenschaftliche Präzision im Werk der Maria Sibylla Merian, 2005). |
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| Source/Photographer | https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_SL-5275-18 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Permission (Reusing this file) |
© The Trustees of the British Museum, released as CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Licensing
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