A Beginner’s Pictorial Encyclopedia of Natural History
Tachibana Morikuni Japanese
Not on view
This is a later edition of a crucial drawing manual of the eighteenth century, originally published in 1761. To my knowledge it is extremely hard to find a first edition of this work, and this edition dates precisely to the time when Morikuni impacted the art world most powerfully at the end of the eighteenth century, nearly a half century after his death. An artist such as Katsushika Hokusai drew inspiration for his own prints and visual encyclopedias from Morikuni’s wide-ranging depictions of the world around him. These volumes focus in particular on avian subjects.
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