It was unlike any other book yet written. There were other publications on insects, but according to Etheridge, no one had ever drawn their full life cycle and their ecological connections. Instead of depicting them as specimens set against a plain background, Merian showed the relationships between animals and plants. And at a time when other scientists were trying to make sense of the natural world by classifying plants and animals into narrow categories, Merian looked at their place within the wider natural world. She searched for connections where others were looking for separation.

Merian was an extraordinary woman—curious, intelligent, and independent-minded. According to Todd, she left her husband in 1685 and moved with her daughters to a religious sect in Friesland. There was a public spat with Graff as he tried, to no avail, to get his wife back. A few years later, Merian moved again, to Amsterdam, to live alone with her daughters. There she found a world fueled by trade and the Dutch empire, a world where women were allowed to have a business and earn money. Collectors bought her drawings and opened their cabinets of curiosities for her. She saw marvelous butterflies and moths with magnificently patterned wings, some the size of a palm but pinned into their wooden trays—disconnected from their pupae, eggs, and food. The exotic specimens had arrived from all corners of the Dutch empire, but Merian was determined to see them in their natural habitat.

In June 1699, aged 52, she and her youngest daughter boarded a ship headed to the northwestern coast of South America, to Surinam, the colony that the Dutch had swapped with the English for Manhattan. It was an audacious enterprise. Not only was Merian a woman naturalist in the male–dominated scientific world of the late seventeenth century, Etheridge writes; she also embarked on a exploration for entirely scientific purposes before it became fashionable. (Previous explorations always had political, economic, or military premises.) She traveled alone and without protection, and financed her adventure by selling her drawings.

For two years, according to Todd, Merian collected whatever she could get her hands on—in the vegetable gardens of the capital Paramaribo, on the banks of the Surinam River, and in fields and forests of the sugar plantations. She took the boat up the river past caimans to explore the rainforest. She questioned indigenous people and paid them to bring her insects. They hacked paths into the jungle so that she could scramble through the tangle in corset and petticoat. She climbed up ladders to reach the higher branches and happily brought hundreds of caterpillars into her house. She returned to Amsterdam after 2 years, in the summer of 1701.

The result of this expedition was Merian’s magnificent Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, written in Latin, the international language of science, and a lavish folio edition of 60 stunning copperplate engravings that brought the exotic world of the rainforest to the damp drawing rooms of Europe. The drawings were exquisite. Azure blue butterflies hovering over delicate blossoms, moths unfurling their proboscis, fat frogs together with their eggs and tadpoles, dazzlingly striped caterpillars munching on leaves and leggy ants crawling up branches. Merian’s nature was beautiful, but true-to life. Her blossoms had holes, her leaves were half chewed, and her blooms had lost their petals.