Imagine a world of constant wars and deadly plagues, a world without eyeglasses, bicycles, or sanitation. Imagine being a gifted child in that world, knowing you are born into a body that will never be granted the basic rights of citizenship in any country, into a mind that will never be allowed to expand in any institution of higher learning.
Dorothea Maria Graff (May 13, 1678–May 5, 1743) was born into such a world.
Through one of those wondrous rabbit holes that any passionate curiosity opens into the terra firma of culture, I discovered Graff’s strange and beautiful creatures in the course of my bird divinations project. Partway between encyclopedia and fairy tale, they rendered her one of the first fine artists to bring their brush to the young science of ornithology, more than a century ahead of Audubon and Elizabeth Gould.
At a time when natural history illustration depicted specimens in isolation, Graff painted living organisms in relationship with other living organisms — she painted ecosystems, doing for birds and reptiles what Marianne North would do for plants a generation later.
Despite their singular style, Graff’s paintings, now preserved by the magnificent cathedral of culture that is the British Museum, were long attributed to her mother — the trailblazing etymological artist Maria Sibylla Merian, whose classic visual study of the insects of Suriname her daughter helped illustrate. (In this regard, Maria and Dorothea affirm in the history of art what Marie Curie and her Nobel-winning daughter Irene affirm in the history of science — that what a parent models and nourishes for and in a child is an infinitely more powerful portal of possibility than any formal system of education and cultural permission.)
After her mother’s death in 1717, Graff went on to teach at the Russian Academy of Sciences and to work as a curator at Russia’s founding art museum — one of the first people in the world with a dual formal appointment in both art and science, animated by the stubborn recognition that these seemingly disparate lenses on reality, when combined, only magnify our understanding of it, that in the very act of combining them we come to know the world more intimately and therefore to love it more deeply.
For more visionary women who followed in Graff’s footsteps across space and time, leap forward a century with English artist Sarah Stone’s stunning natural history paintings of exotic and endangered animals, then another century into the daring life and art of pioneering American plant ecologist Edith Clements.
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