This illustrated book is about a remarkable collection of botanical drawings belonging to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh. The watercolors were commissioned by Alexander Gibson, an East India Company surgeon, and depict plants grown in the botanic gardens under his control in the Bombay Presidency. They are the work of an unknown Portuguese-Indian artist and were made between 1847 and 1850. The main section of the book includes colour reproductions of the 170 drawings arranged in order of the Bombay Flora, which Gibson co-authored with Nicholas Dalzell. Half the species depicted are native to western India, the other half are exotics from as far afield as Argentina and Australia. The color plates are preceded by substantial chapters on Gibson's life and work and a history of Dapuri and the other botanic gardens under his charge. An illustrated introduction tells of the author's travels in search of information about Gibson, his gardens and the drawings.

An investigation into how landscape drawing informed a new Dutch identity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, amid enormous expansion in global commerce and colonization, landscape drawing played a key role in forging Dutch national identity. Featuring works on paper by Rembrandt, Bruegel, and Ruisdael, among dozens of other artists, this study examines how a hyperlocal impulse in many of these drawings inspired domestic pride and a sense of connection to the land, as they also reflected aspects of the broader ecological and social change taking place. Incisive essays offer close readings that push our understandings of these artists and their work in important new directions, including eco-criticism, land use and environmentalism, race, and class. Distributed for the Harvard Art Museums Exhibition Schedule: Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA (May 21-August 14, 2022)

The majesty of Earth's most magnificent features was the domain of Wilson Hurley (1924-2008). In paintings of natural wonders throughout the galaxy, he was committed to expressing his love of the richness of reality. His journey to become a revered twentieth-century American landscapist is brought to life in this intimate biography. Written for appreciators, collectors, and working artists, Hurley's goals and procedures - from thumbnails to plein air field studies and finished studio paintings - are elucidated in depth, including a commission that resulted in five monumental triptychs of our nation's most prized vistas installed at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.

In 1559 and 1561, the Antwerp print publisher Hieronymus Cock issued an unprecedented series of landscape prints known today simply as the Small Landscapes. The forty-four prints included in the series offer views of the local countryside surrounding Antwerp in simple, unembellished compositions. At a time when vast panoramic and allegorical landscapes dominated the art market, the Small Landscapes represent a striking innovation. This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the significance of the Small Landscapes in early modern print culture. It charts a diachronic history of the series over the century it was in active circulation, from 1559 to the middle of the seventeenth century. Adopting the lifespan of the prints as the framework of the study, Alexandra Onuf analyzes the successive states of the plates and the changes to the series as a whole in order to reveal the shifting artistic and contextual valences of the images at their different moments and places of publication. This unique case study allows for a new perspective on the trajectory of print publishing over the course of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries across multiple publishing houses, highlighting the seminal importance of print publishers in the creation and dissemination of visual imagery and cultural ideas. Looking at other visual materials and contemporary sources - including texts as diverse as humanist poetry and plays, agricultural manuals, polemical broadsheets, and peasant songs - Onuf situates the Small Landscapes within the larger cultural discourse on rural land and the meaning of the local in the turbulent early modern Netherlands. The study focuses new attention on the active and reciprocal intersections between printed pictures and broader cultural, economic and political phenomena.

With the imagination of a writer and the eye of an artist, Michael Korda doodled on the backs of old manuscripts in his tackroom while his wife, Margaret, was out riding. They loved and acquired cats-a habit written about previously in their book, Cat People-and the few in residence at this time would serve as inspiration for the drawings. These are no ordinary cat illustrations, though. Korda's cats read newspapers and books; go ice skating in the small country town where they live; comfort Margaret's horse, Monty, after a stressful vet visit; sell fried mice at the Farmer's Market, and undertake (on paper, at least) whatever fanciful endeavours their keeper conjures up. The result is a collection of magical pieces, filled with joy, that represent a year in the life of a couple in love with one another, and certainly with their cats.

From the mountains to the ocean shores, from the wetlands to the deserts, North America teems with flora and fauna in delicately balanced ecosystems found nowhere else on Earth. With this book in hand, you will understand the language of nature and see those wild places with new eyes. You'll learn to recognize the lobed leaf of an Oracle Oak, the webbed tracks of a River Otter, and the fine, cream-colored tentacles of a Frilled Anemone. This volume celebrates a tradition of knowledge established by the Nature Study Guild. For more than sixty years, the Guild's pocket guidebooks have helped hikers, campers, foragers, and explorers navigate the great outdoors. Now, the best of the guides' informative text and iconic illustrations are gathered in one handsome hardcover: the perfect reference for today's ramblers.

The book showcases 75 beautiful words evocative of the wild, from all around the world, that describe natural happenings in nature. It includes words that describe weather, or a feeling you have when in nature as well as sensory words that explain the smell or sound of a place. The words used to express what is seen in the world are vital to an appreciation of it - language is a key component in the call of the wild. As words vanish from a language, it follows that what they describe may disappear. Words deepen understanding of what is seen, and what is seen comes more vividly to life through the words used to describe it. As the natural world and the time spent in it diminish in the face of modern life, it's more vital than ever to recall it into being with the magic of language. Each of the 75 words will have a 100-word description, including its pronunciation, a geographical/historical/cultural background, as well as reflecting on the emotional/mindful response the natural phenomenon can inspire. Each word will be paired with an illustration Examples of words: Mangata. Sweden. Noun. The path of light that the moon makes on water. Sugar weather. Canada. Noun. A period of warm days and cold nights - the perfect weather to start the sap flowing in maple trees. Rudenja. Lithuania. The way nature begins to feel as autumn takes hold and the vestiges of summer disappear. Komorebi. Japan. Noun. Beams of sunlight filtering down through the trees.

How do our senses help us to understand the world? This question, which preoccupied Enlightenment thinkers in Western Europe, also emerged as a key theme in depictions of animals in eighteenth-century art. This book examines the ways in which painters, sculptors, porcelain modelers, and other decorative designers portrayed animals as sensing subjects who physically confirmed the value of material experience. The independent agency of animals with their own right to free existence, a topic of growing urgency in our own era, emerges in striking and often surprising ways within this early nexus of artistic experimentation. The sensual style known today as the Rococo encouraged the proliferation of animals as exemplars of empirical inquiry in the eighteenth century, ranging from the popular subject of the monkey artist to the alchemical wonders of the life-sized porcelain animals created for the Saxon court. Examining writings on sensory knowledge by La Mettre, Condillac, Diderot and other philosophers side by side with depictions of the animal in art, Cohen argues that artists promoted the animal as a sensory, thinking subject while also validating the material basis of their own professional practice.

Learn how to play mah-jong with this beautifully illustrated mah-jong set! Animal Mah-jong takes the traditional Chinese tile game and updates it for a new audience in this affordable card format. Rather than the traditional line drawings of bamboo and Chinese characters, it features Ryuto Miyake's beautiful animal illustrations - each suit features Asian animals from the land, sea and air. Get ready to pong, chow and kong like you never have before! Stunning illustrations by Ryuto Miyake Affordable new card format Screen-free fun - a high quality non-digital game for all ages Suitable for children and familes to play together

Elizabeth Sutton, using a phenomenological approach, investigates how animals in art invite viewers to contemplate human relationships to the natural world. Using Rembrandt van Rijn's etching of The Presentation in the Temple (c. 1640), Joseph Beuys's social sculpture I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), archaic rock paintings at Horseshoe Canyon, Canyonlands National Park, and examples from contemporary art, this book demonstrates how artists across time and cultures employed animals to draw attention to the sensory experience of the composition and reflect upon the shared sensory awareness of the world.

The paintings of Paul Feiler (1918-2013), the focus of this first survey of the artist's life and career, were inspired by the English landscape, particularly the cliffs and inlets of the coast of south-west Cornwall. For his friend Peter Lanyon, Feiler's early works provided him with a sense of 'calm and I mean a sense of pause...To achieve that repose in the landscape I know one has to suffer the opposite.' Feiler's vision was based on the understanding that 'you stand vertically and you look horizontally'; through this he aimed to fulfil Cezanne's requirement that 'a picture should give us...an abyss in which the eye is lost.' He moved from painterly abstraction to an exploration of the elusive nature of space through the effects of narrow bands of colour, silver and gold in a pattern of square and circle, which he varied and developed over more than forty years. Based on full access to the artist's archive of letters, catalogues and photographs, Michael Raeburn describes how Feiler overcame many painful early experiences to achieve the meditative serenity of his deeply spiritual work. For all those interested in the history of modern British painting, this is a much-needed resource.

Tracing the life of the plants and animals of Forrestdale Lake through the six seasons of the local indigenous people, the first part of Black Swan Lake presents a wetlands calendar over a yearly cycle of the rising, falling and drying waters of this internationally important wetland in south-western Australia. The second part of this book considers issues and explores themes from the first part, including a cultural history of the seasons and the black swan. Black Swan Lake is a book of nature writing and environmental history and philosophy arising from living in a particular place with other beings. The book is a guide to living simply and sustainably with the earth in troubled times and places by making and maintaining a strong attachment and vital connection to a local place and its flora and fauna. Local places and their living processes sustain human and other life on this living earth.

A book that debunks the popular myth that William Wordsworth was, first and foremost, a poet of daffodils, Wordsworth's Gardens and Flowers: The Spirit of Paradise provides a vivid account of Wordsworth as a gardening poet who not only wrote about gardens and flowers but also designed - and physically worked in - his gardens. Wordsworth's Gardens and Flowers: The Spirit of Paradise is a book of two halves. The first section focuses on the gardens that Wordsworth made at Grasmere and Rydal in the English Lake District, and also in Leicestershire, at Coleorton. The gardens are explored via his poetry and prose and the journals of his sister, Dorothy Wordsworth. In the second half of the book, the reader learns more of Wordsworth's use of flowers in his poetry, exploring the vital importance of British flowers and other 'unassuming things' to his work, as well as their wider cultural, religious and political meaning. Throughout, the engaging, accessible text is woven around illustrations that bring Wordsworth's gardens and flowers to life, including rare botanical prints, many reproduced here for the first time in several decades.

A guide to landscape painting for complete beginners with simple exercises. Hazel Soan is a hugely successful painter and an outstanding teacher and author of art books, which have introduced the wonders of art to a generation of amateur artists. In this book she teaches you how to get to grips with watercolour landscapes in the space of an afternoon. The book explores the basics of watercolour landscapes with lots of simple exercises and step-by-step demonstrations that are perfect for beginners. That life-long ambition of painting somewhere that is important to you can become a possibility with the help of this nifty little book. Topics covered include creating space, composition and focus, light and shadows, colours of the landscape and the mixing of watercolours. Watercolour painting techniques such as painting en plein air, brushwork, creating texture, wet into wet and wet on dry are explained. The book also explores specific landscape themes such as skies, foliage, forests, gardens, seascapes, wilderness, sunsets, urban landscapes, panoramas, sunsets and many more.

A rich vein of the artist's mature work, depicting the foundations of landscape and place From the mid-1860s until shortly before his death, Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) created 27 canvases that take rock formations as their principal subjects. This is the first publication to focus exclusively on these extraordinary works. It illustrates all of Cezanne's mature paintings of rock formations, including scenes of the terrain of the forest of Fontainebleau, the Mediterranean coastal village of L'Estaque, and the area around Aix-en-Provence, alongside examples of his watercolors of these subjects. An introductory essay by John Elderfield assesses these paintings in terms of their character, development, and relationship to Cezanne's other works; their critical interpretations; and their geological and corporeal associations. Faya Causey's essay examines the Provencal context of Cezanne's rock and quarry paintings, as well as the status of geology in France during the second half of the 19th century. The catalogue section, introduced by Anna Swinbourne, chronicles the sites, presenting details of where specifically the paintings were made and of the features that they represent, together with technical aspects of particular works. Distributed for the Princeton University Art Museum Exhibition Schedule: Princeton University Art Museum

German photographer Hildegard Theodora Monssen (b.1948) creates sensual flower portraits that are both expressive and mysterious. She captures her motifs with natural light in extreme close-ups and reveals the personality of wilting flowers in all their vulnerability. Her images make visible the beauty of transience and temporality. Her balanced works of art function as a reflective memento mori. --Rick Vercauteren, Director of the Museum van Bommel-Van Dam, Venlo, NL from 2005 - 2019.

When first-time author and artist Deborah Paris stepped into Lennox Woods, an old-growth southern hardwood forest in northeast Texas, she felt a disruption that was both spatial and temporal. Walking the remnants of an old wagon trail past ancient stands of pine, white oak, elm, hickory, sweetgum, maple, hornbeam, and red oak, she felt drawn into a reverie that took her back to 'the beginning, both physically and metaphorically.'Painting the Woods: Nature, Memory and Metaphor explores the experience of landscape through the lens of art and art-making. It is a place-based meditation on nature, art, memory, and time, grounded in Paris's experiences over the course of a year in Lennox Woods. Her account unfolds through the twin arcs of the changing seasons and her creative process as a landscape painter. In the tradition of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, narrative passages interweave with observations about the natural history of Lennox Woods, its flora and fauna, art history, the science of memory, Transcendentalist philosophy, the role of metaphor in creative work, and even loop quantum gravity theory. Each chapter explores a different aspect of the forest and a different step in the art-making process, illuminating our connection to the natural world through language, comprehension of time, and visual depictions of the landscape. The complex layers of the forest and Paris's journey through it emerge as metaphors for the larger themes of the book, just as the natural world underpins the art-making drawn from it. Like the trail that winds through Lennox Woods, memory and time intertwine to provide a path for understanding nature, art, and our relationship to both.

Hokusai's series depicting Mount Fuji is widely considered to be the pinnacle of his career. This beautiful boxed accordion- fold edition comprises the full set of forty-six prints (the original thirty-six and ten more that were completed later) and features a luxurious silken binding along with a separate explanatory booklet. The book and booklet are packaged in an elegant slipcase. Devoted entirely to landscapes, Hokusai's series shows Mount Fuji from various viewpoints, framed in different ways. An indefatigable traveler who was passionate about nature, Hokusai explored every vantage point and season at the volcano. He presented it both as a solitary and majestic snow-capped peak and as a smaller object on a distant horizon. Hokusai also portrayed the mountain as an element in Japanese daily life and as an imposing force of nature that can be peaceful and beneficent, or ferocious and unforgiving. These impeccably reproduced prints invite readers to examine Hokusai's virtuosic use of color and composition, his talent for contrasting perspectives, and his interest in the dueling roles of man and nature. An exquisite objet d'art, this volume is the perfect vehicle for appreciating Hokusai's crowning achievement in all its lasting and subtle beauty.

A survey of 21 contemporary artists who specialise in painting gardens. The artists come from the United Kingdom as well as Europe and the United States. They work in a wide range of media including watercolour, acrylics, oils and tempera. For each artist, there is a brief biographical thumbnail sketch, reproductions of a variety of their work, and comments from the artists on their painting styles and working practices. The result is a intriguing look at this fascinating subject. A beautiful book with a foreword by Sir Roy Strong.