Frogs and toads live in water and on land, and they change shape completely as they grow. That double life made them easy to load with meaning. In Europe a frog often signals folly, sin or decay, while in East Asia a toad can bring luck and money.
These twelve works were made between about 1470 and 1879. In each one, the frog or toad changes how the picture reads. Some are jokes, and a few are hard to look at.
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How These Were Chosen
A work made the list when the frog or toad does a job in it: it warns, it mocks, it teaches natural history, or it carries magic. An animal that only hops through the background, or lives only in a title, did not count.
The list opens with a naturalist's watercolor of a toad carrying its young on its back. It ends with a man so absorbed in a street trick that something leaps from his mouth.
12. Maria Sibylla Merian, Shoreline Purslane and Suriname Toad (1702 to 1703)
A flat toad sprawls at the foot of a seaside plant, and its back is studded with small round eggs. Maria Sibylla Merian, a German-born painter and naturalist, painted it on vellum, a fine calfskin, in 1702 or 1703.
She had just come back from two years of fieldwork in Suriname, then a Dutch colony on the northern coast of South America. The plant is shoreline purslane, a fleshy herb of sandy coasts. The animal is the common Suriname toad, known to scientists as Pipa pipa.
Those eggs hold the strangest story on the sheet. During mating, the male presses them onto the female's back, which has swollen to receive them. Her skin then grows over them one by one, so that each sits in its own pocket.
Inside that pocket, each egg becomes a tadpole, then a tiny toad. When it is big enough, the young animal breaks through its mother's skin and swims away. Merian was among the first European naturalists to describe this birth through the skin.
The question behind it had followed her since childhood. In her day, many people still believed that insects were born from mud, by spontaneous generation. At thirteen, in her hometown of Frankfurt, she raised silkworms and watched them turn from egg to caterpillar to moth.
Her family gave her the means to record what she saw. Her father was the printmaker Matthias Merian, and her stepfather, the still-life painter Jacob Marrel, trained her in flower painting.
In 1699 she sailed to Suriname with her younger daughter, Dorothea. They stayed until 1701 and followed the life cycles of the local insects. A toad whose young grow inside their mother's back belonged with those studies, another creature that passes from egg to a new body before the eyes.
Back in Amsterdam, she published her book on the insects of Suriname in 1705, and this sheet is a version of plate 59. To make luxury copies, she found a shortcut. She inked parts of the etched copper plate, printed them on paper, and pressed a sheet of vellum onto the wet print.
The ink passed onto the vellum, reversed, as a faint ghost of the image called a counterproof. Merian then painted over that outline in watercolor, probably with her daughters' help. The sheet is both at once, a pale print underneath and color on top.
At a Glance
Artist: Maria Sibylla Merian (1647 to 1717)
Made: 1702 to 1703
Medium: Watercolor and bodycolor with gum arabic over lightly etched outlines, on vellum
Where to see it: Royal Collection, United Kingdom
About This Work
How big is Merian's Suriname toad?
The sheet measures 36.1 by 29.1 centimeters, about 14 1/4 by 11 1/2 inches. Its catalog number is RCIN 921217.
How did the Suriname toad sheet reach the Royal Collection?
The sheet first belonged to Dr Richard Mead, who died in 1754. It was sold at auction in 1755 and again in 1768, and King George III owned it by about 1810.
Did Merian paint other frogs?
Yes. The Royal Collection also holds her Marsh Marigold with the Life Stages of a Frog, dated about 1705 to 1710.
11. Unknown Swabian or Upper Rhenish painter, The Dead Lovers (about 1470)
Two rotting corpses stand side by side. Snakes and worms crawl over them, flies and dragonflies hover, and a toad squats on the woman's belly.
An unknown German painter made this panel about 1470, in oil on fir. He probably came from Ulm, in Swabia, in southwestern Germany, or more broadly from the Upper Rhine, around Strasbourg and Basel. The picture is in the Musée de l'Œuvre Notre-Dame in Strasbourg.
The two dead are a bride and groom, and for centuries they had a second face, on the other side of the same piece of wood.