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Pages from an anonymous Japanese watercolour sketchbook c. 1870.

Nature

Mr. J. (or S) Springsguth’s coloured etchings (1833) let you see what a variety of fossilised madrepores actually feels like.

Time has so nearly erased the biography of J. Springsguth that beyond...

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Nature Obscurity

Gautier d’Agoty (1716–1785). His art was described as “arrogance and charlatanery” and his studio looked like a Jack the Ripper crime scene. Take a good look at yourself.

Jacques Fabien Gautier d’Agoty (1716–1785) was a French anatomist, painter and printmaker...

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Art & Design Nature

Everything that there is to know about E. Wheeler, the mysterious turn of the century English mushroom artist of Clevedon & the Severn Valley.

The signature, E. Wheeler appears on the bottom right hand corner of...

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Nature

Rinus Knopper (1909-1993). Official photographer of Amsterdam City’s new towns, 1953-1959.

There’s not much to see here yet. That’s the point. This is...

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Obscurity

Anonymous citizen shoots Hitler. March 1938, a triumphant Führer tours Berlin in an open top car. Someone in the waiting crowd shoots. The results have stayed hidden for 83 years.

83 years after they happened, a few moments, rare image fragments of...

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History Obscurity

Joseph Schillinger. He told us so.

Joseph Schillinger (1895-1945), was a man way ahead of his time. In...

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Art & Design

Carl Ignaz Leopold Kny & his Botanische Wandtafeln (1874-1911). Part Number One : In which we see Kny’s more colourful physiology artworks of mushroom & fern.

It began in the early 1860s and as a student in Berlin...

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Art & Design Nature

Carl Ignaz Leopold Kny & his Botanische Wandtafeln (1874-1911). Part Number Two : In which Kny pares back his already minimal colour palette to create for us a more mono/duotone mushroom, fern & algae experience.

These images are University instructional posters. They come from a series entitled...

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Art & Design Nature

Dr. Arnold Dodel-Port, was a Swiss socialist botanist, a freethinker and champion of Darwin’s theory of evolution. He was also an exquisite artist who made the plant systematics of organisms (such as the Volvox Globator) mind bendingly beautiful.

During the late 1800s, in German speaking countries, the Swiss botanist, Dr....

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Nature

Jean-Baptiste Pillement (1728-1808). He was king of Roccoco in the 1700’s, preferred decorator to Marie Antoinette and the kings of Poland and Austria, yet died completely penniless. His landscapes were eye candy fantasy worlds for the 18th century mega rich.

Feted by the hyper rich and influential of the time, Pillement was...

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Art & Design

FACT : You don’t want to read a book about the zoology and comparative anatomy of rare Italian sea planariums. Not when you can look at these pictures from Arnold Lang’s 1884’s “The polyclades of the Gulf of Naples” instead.

Arnold Lang (1855 – 1914) was a Swiss naturalist, a comparative anatomist and...

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Art & Design Nature

Helene Schjerfbeck began as a precociously skilled, slightly melancholic late-19th-century academic realist. She finished as a painter whose sublime abstract images are an exquisite harmony of pure paint and cryptic description.

“I have to draw to the point of madness, just draw. Just work, work and think of nothing else”, said the brilliant Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. It did him no good, he was just another “degenerate” artist to the Nazis.

From hat shop girl to Dutch art icon. But who was the Girl in the Kimono? The opaque story of an 1890s working class teenager immortalised by George Hendrik Breitner.

Descendant of samurai and relentless entrepreneur, Ogawa Kazumasa opened Tokyo’s first photo studio, shot Japan’s art treasures, the 100 prettiest geisha in Tokyo and taught photography to the military. His legacy is these exquisite images of flowers.

L’Estampe Moderne; the 1890s Parisian Art Nouveau “best of” album feat. various international artists. 4 lithographs every month. Just 3₣r 50c an issue.

It’s easy to see how, in the mid 1800s, Paul Gustave Doré “hypnotized the widest public ever captured by a major illustrator”. Even Van Gogh was a fan, he copied Doré shortly before shooting himself.

In the 1890s the Dutch painter, George Hendrik Breitner took nude reference photos for his paintings. In the 1990s they were found.

Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach. 1880s free love messiah, naturist, pacifist, vegetarian, sun worshipper and unique symbolist painter.

Found photos : Three lost decades of Iowa Speedway recovered. With Merlin Benning, Lester “Red” Dralle. Claus Stricker, Don & Dick Feckers & Red Droste. 1950>1970.

The Art of Protest: Albert Hahn was righteous anger manifest. A graphic character assassin that even the mighty Germany Kaiser feared.

It’s 1914. and Orientalism meets Art Nouveau and the early stirrings of Art Deco in Emile-Allain Séguy’s “Samarkande: 20 Compositions en couleurs dans le Style oriental”.

The 1920s French Art Deco influencer who drew pure design inspiration from the natural world. Insectes (1929) by Émile-Allain Séguy.

The forgotten Finska Vyer birch bark album, by I.K Inha, 1892. Inside are raw natural landscape photographs of Finland. It won the 1st international photographic competion in Paris.

William Morris. Strawberry Thief . “You can picture my Father going out in the early morning and watching the rascally thrushes at work on the fruit beds…”

The Swiss artist, Ernst Kreidolf (1863-1956). A Princess helped him give up the life of a farmer to put his faith and future in the hands of the flower fairies. He lived magically ever after.

Painter & early street photographer. The astonishing early street photography that helped George Hendrik Breitner add social realism to his famous paintings of Amsterdam.

India mid-1800s : Dr John Murray, cholera specialist an photographer. He spent 40 years travelling with gear weighing 400 pounds and a servant. His ever so slightly psychedelic negatives made it all worth it.

Samarkand, early 1900s. The first ever colour photographs of the ancient Persian city by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, an unknown Russian who invented his own colour photography process.

It’s 1914. and Orientalism meets Art Nouveau and the early stirrings of Art Deco in Emile-Allain Séguy’s “Samarkande: 20 Compositions en couleurs dans le Style oriental”.

Around the world with the rare travel drawings by the American painter, Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900). Found in the archives of the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

Pages from an anonymous Japanese watercolour sketchbook c. 1870.

Mr. J. (or S) Springsguth’s coloured etchings (1833) let you see what a variety of fossilised madrepores actually feels like.

Gautier d’Agoty (1716–1785). His art was described as “arrogance and charlatanery” and his studio looked like a Jack the Ripper crime scene. Take a good look at yourself.

Everything that there is to know about E. Wheeler, the mysterious turn of the century English mushroom artist of Clevedon & the Severn Valley.

Rinus Knopper (1909-1993). Official photographer of Amsterdam City’s new towns, 1953-1959.

Anonymous citizen shoots Hitler. March 1938, a triumphant Führer tours Berlin in an open top car. Someone in the waiting crowd shoots. The results have stayed hidden for 83 years.

Joseph Schillinger. He told us so.

Carl Ignaz Leopold Kny & his Botanische Wandtafeln (1874-1911). Part Number One : In which we see Kny’s more colourful physiology artworks of mushroom & fern.

Carl Ignaz Leopold Kny & his Botanische Wandtafeln (1874-1911). Part Number Two : In which Kny pares back his already minimal colour palette to create for us a more mono/duotone mushroom, fern & algae experience.

Dr. Arnold Dodel-Port, was a Swiss socialist botanist, a freethinker and champion of Darwin’s theory of evolution. He was also an exquisite artist who made the plant systematics of organisms (such as the Volvox Globator) mind bendingly beautiful.

Jean-Baptiste Pillement (1728-1808). He was king of Roccoco in the 1700’s, preferred decorator to Marie Antoinette and the kings of Poland and Austria, yet died completely penniless. His landscapes were eye candy fantasy worlds for the 18th century mega rich.

FACT : You don’t want to read a book about the zoology and comparative anatomy of rare Italian sea planariums. Not when you can look at these pictures from Arnold Lang’s 1884’s “The polyclades of the Gulf of Naples” instead.