Jacob Marrel

Jacob Marrel painted flowers in the years when a single tulip bulb could cost more than a house. Born around 1613 in Frankenthal in the German Palatinate, he trained in Frankfurt and then in Utrecht in the Dutch Republic under Jan Davidsz de Heem, one of the great still-life painters of the day, and he built his name on lavish bouquets set in stone niches, with tulips almost always at the centre.

He worked both sides of the boom. Besides his paintings he made tulip books, albums of watercolour portraits of individual varieties that collectors used much like a dealer's catalogue, and he traded in bulbs and pictures himself.

In 1651 he settled in Frankfurt and married the widow of the great engraver and publisher Matthäus Merian. That marriage made him stepfather to her daughter Maria Sibylla Merian, the girl who would grow into one of the finest painters and observers of insects in Europe, and it was Marrel who first taught her to paint flowers and to look closely at the small living things among them. He died in Frankfurt in 1681.