3 Free eBooks – December 2017

This month I picked books with an Asian theme:

Bing, Siegfried. Artistic Japan: illustrations and essays. London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co. Six volumes available from the Internet Archive here; published in the late 1800s. Most of the illustrations are in color…and represent a broad range of Japanese art from the time. I picked an image of a textile but there is a lot of other types of art in these volumes.

Ando, Hiroshige. Ehon Edo miyage. Kikuya Kozaburo han. 1850 or after and before 1868. Six volumes available from Smithsonian Libraries here. Images in soft colors depicting Japan in the mid 1800s. I picked one from the fourth volume that looked like a road lined with cherry trees blooming in the spring. There were some other images of landscapes with snow that I liked almost as well.

Oriental Textile Samples. 1700. Available from the Internet Archive here. This book is a reminder of how rich the textile tradition is – particularly from China. I clipped a part of the cover – which must have also been textile. There is a note that the book is ‘fabric samples mounted in accordion-style, silk covered, volumes in brown cloth-covered folios’.