While searching for stamps with pictures of bridges, I found an interesting story: art swiss engraver 17th century Matteas Merian Old (1593-1650).

First, I found three stamps of the same story: view of Berlin in the mid-17th century.




All are made of one engraving, etching itself as an accurate document, you can confidently call every church spire. But the stamps are different: there is a bridge somewhere, but where it is not.

Later, I began to pay attention to that name and found many interesting stamps made in his engravings. Merian has had an interesting fate: he was born in Switzerland, in Basel, studied in France, married and had a business in Germany, in Frankfurt-am-Main, and worked in Austria, and Sweden. He has published books on geography, which were illustrated with his own engravings. These prints and got on postage stamps.






At the end of his life he had a daughter - Maria Sibylla (1647-1717). In his works, she left us a perfect picture of flowers, fruits and animals. She became a naturalist, entomologist and scientific illustrator.


After teaching painting and engraving from the masters of "flower" still life of Jacob and Abraham Mignon Marella lived and painted with her husband, a German painter Johann Andreas Graf in Nuremberg and Amsterdam.




Few of her works





Even in adulthood she and her daughter traveled to Suriname (1699-1701) and then released the book "The Metamorphosis of Surinamese insects," 1705. Most valuable part of the publications, collections, and watercolors of Maria Merian, Peter I bought to museums and libraries in Russia. In Suriname, published two series of stamps on the pictures of Maria Merian. And she got on a postage stamp and the bill of Germany.


