Inscribed, verso, N.100 uit Boek f. van Jan Bisschop’s Verk. te Rottm. Juni 1771/44-/ Een Surinaamsche Sauvegard, door Maria Sybilla Meriam

Pen and black ink and watercolor and gouache on vellum

13 x 17 inches

329 x 430 mm

Provenance

Jan Bisschop (1680/81-1771), Rotterdam (his sale: Rotterdam, Bosch and Arrenberg, 24 June 1771, Album A, lot 100: “Een Surinaamse Sauvegard door dezelven [i.e. Maria Sibylle Merian]” [with lots 101 and 102 to van der Marck for 35 fl.])

Johan van der Marck Ægzn (1707-1772), Leiden (no mark; see Lugt 3001) (his sale: Amsterdam, de Winter & IJver, 29 November 1773, Album H, lot 717: “Een Surinaamse Sauve-Garde; als vooen getekend” [i.e. with watercolor on vellum] [with lot 716 to “Delfos” for 7 fl.])

Dr. Jan Tak, Leiden (his sale: Haarlem, Jan van de Vinne, 10 October 1780, Album B, lot 170: “Een Surinaamsche Sauvegarde, uitvoerigmet eaterverw op pergament getekend, door Sybille Merian” [to “Heemskerck” for 20 fl.])

Jonkheer L.J. Quarles van Ufford (his sale: Haarlem, 23 March 1784, Album 4, lot 174: “La Sauvegarde de Surinam. Aquarelle très soignée”)

Sale: London, Sotheby’s, 7 July 1999, lot 37, illustrated

Exhibitions

New York, W. M. Brady & Co., in association with Thomas Williams Fine Art, London, Old Master Drawings, 2000, cat. no. 24, illustrated

Literature

J. S. Turner, with contributions by F. Stampfle, Dutch Drawings in the Pierpont Morgan Library: Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, New York, 2006, cat. no. 154, illustrated

This drawing served as the model in reverse for the engraving that appears as plate 70 in the third edition of Maria Sibylla Merian’s Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (The Hague, 1726; first edition, Amsterdam, 1705).

THE MORGAN LIBRARY AND MUSEUM, NEW YORK