Catherine Powell-Warren – författare

At once collector, botanist, reader, artist, and patron, Agnes Block is best described as a cultural producer. A member of an influential network in her lifetime, today she remains a largely obscure figure. The socioeconomic and political barriers faced by early modern women, together with a male-dominated tradition in art history, have meant that too few stories of women’s roles in the creation, production, and consumption of art have reached us. This book seeks to write Block and her contributions into the art and cultural history of the seventeenth-century Netherlands, highlighting the need for and advantages of a multifaceted approach to research on early modern women. Examining Block’s achievements, relationships, and objects reveals a woman who was independent, knowledgeable, self-aware, and not above self-promotion. Though her gender brought few opportunities and many barriers, Agnes Block succeeded in fashioning herself as Flora Batava, a liefhebber at the intersection of art and science.

In 1679, the commentator Joachim von Sandrart described Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) as a painter who had perfected the art of the miniature and of flower painting, a high and deserved honour. Posthumously, however, it is Merian’s status as an entomologist or naturalist that has garnered the most attention; she has not received her due as an artist. This book remedies this situation and assists the reader in understanding Merian’s life as a woman and as an artist in the early modern Dutch Republic. Using Merian’s hundreds of extant watercolours and book illustrations as sources, in combination with her surviving correspondence and with contemporary art treatises, Catherine Powell-Warren recognizes the artistic contributions of Maria Sibylla Merian, and situates them in their socio-cultural and creative context.This book is the first to consider Merian's art and art-historical significance: her artistic range; her techniques; the rich visual rhetoric she deployed in her works; and her innovations. Merian may not have been a guild member, but she was for all intents and purposes the head of a for-profit business (a 'master'), seeing to the training of her daughters and managing a successful workshop, publishing her works, and networking to secure patrons and resources. Considering the impediments she faced as a woman, her achievements as an artist, as well as in other realms, can be considered noteworthy and perhaps even extraordinary.