This magnificent treasury of 100 full-color plates — many with multiple images — ranges from ornate florals, elegant cranes, and fierce dragons to Silk Road imports and Edo-era textile patterns.

This full-color collection focuses on the artist's early and most popular illustrations, featuring more than 100 images from The Mysterious Stranger, Robin Hood, Robinson Crusoe, The Boy's King Arthur, and other classics.

Lovers of the Occult and the unusual will love this book. It gives a deep insight into the ancient Japanese tradition of magic mirrors and their connection to the Sun Goddess. In Japan mirrors had a peculiar place in society and spirituality. Mirrors were often decorated and surrounded with flowers like we see icons from the West decorated, and some of them are told to have magical properties. This book digs into the special properties. It seems that due to an old technique some Japanese mirrors can present patterns or images, not to the onlooker but at the mirror's reflection in the room, if the light source is just right.

Rare 1849 work reprints 12th- through 17th-century manuscripts on painting and related arts — oil painting practices, mixing pigments, and much more. Commentary on each treatise, plus an extensive introduction.

Featuring 236 drawings by more than 100 artists, this survey of America's most beloved illustrators includes contributions from Edwin Austin Abbey, Maxfield Parrish, Charles Dana Gibson, and Rockwell Kent.

The great 18th-century artist discusses and illustrates the expression of beauty with serpentine lines. Hogarth defines graceful imagery's underlying qualities and dramatizes their effective combination in more than 30 black-and-white plates.

Drawn from the ancient art and artifacts of an international array of museum collections, this spectacular volume offers a unique selection of unusual animal motifs from Prussia, Egypt, Persia, China, Germany, Sweden, and other areas. The edgy designs possess a timeless appeal that makes them especially attractive to contemporary designers, tattoo artists, crafters, and others.

IN the earliest eras of historic Japan there existed a hereditary corporation of raconteurs (Katari-be) who, from generation to generation, performed the function of reciting the exploits of the sovereigns and the deeds of heroes. They accompanied themselves on musical instruments, and naturally, as time went by, each set of raconteurs embellished the language of their predecessors, adding supernatural elements, and introducing details which belonged to the realm of romance rather than to that of ordinary history. These Katari-be would seem to have been the sole repository of their country's annals until the sixth century of the Christian era. Their repertories of recitation included records of the great families as well as of the sovereigns, and it is easy to conceive that the favour and patronage of these high personages were earned by ornamenting the traditions of their households and exalting their pedigrees. But when the art of writing was introduced towards the close of the fourth century, or at the beginning of the fifth, and it was seen that in China, then the centre of learning and civilization, the art had been applied to the compilation of a national history as well as of other volumes possessing great ethical value, the Japanese conceived the ambition of similarly utilizing their new attainment. For reasons which will be understood by and by, the application of the ideographic script to the language of Japan was a task of immense difficulty, and long years must have passed before the attainment of any degree of proficiency.

"Holy Roman Emperor and King of the Germans Maximilian I was Albrecht Dèurer's main patron from 1512 onward. These 45 pages of marginal drawings for the ruler's prayer book, unknown till their 1808 facsimile publication, reveal the artist's lighthearted and witty side. Includes 8 additional drawings by other artists and a new Introduction. "--