Fine Arts Library

For World Elephant Day.

This is a facsimile version of “Libro de la utilidad de los animals” (The Book of the Usefulness of Animals: (Kitāb manāfi' al-hayawān). It is an illustrated Arabic bestiary crafted in 1354, probably in Syria. Each animal is introduced by a description of its characteristic features, habits, and reactions in various situations. Then follows an account of the different anatomical parts of the animal and their curative effects on humans. (From Facsimile Finder)

World Elephant Day was created to bring attention to the urgent plight of Asian and African elephants and to help conserve and protect elephants from the numerous threats they face.

Gasen (畵筌) is a Japanese instructional manual for those learning to draw or paint. This Gasen, a six volume set, was published in 1721, and was created by Hayashi Moriatsu (林守篤). It is considered to be the first of comprehensive, full-scale art manual in Japan.

Hayashi Moriatsu was trained in the Kanou school, which was quick to draw upon Chinese painting manuals. He introduced them as part of the Kanou school’s body of knowledge. The book is designed for beginners, including painting theory and guides on pigments with clear, and accessible illustrations. (Summarized and translated from: 小林宏光Kobayashi, H. (2018). 近世画譜と中国絵画 : 十八世紀の日中美術交流発展史: Kinsei gafu to Chūgoku kaiga : jūhasseiki no Nitchū bijutsu kōryū hattenshi)

The preface is devoted to Chinese painting theories such as the Six Laws, Three Classes, and Twelve Things to Avoid. Volume 1 includes orally taught secrets by Yuugen Ogata, who was Moriatsu’s master teacher. The next four volumes focus on Kanou School painting methods: vol. 2, instructions on how to draw landscapes and plants; vol. 3, birds and animals; vol. 4, Chinese figures; vol. 5, Japanese figures; and vol. 6, methods of mounting and appreciating painting, and how to roll and unroll scrolls. (Summarized from JAANUS: Japanese Art and Architecture Net Users System)

The images shown here in this post are from Gasen (畵筌) by Hayashi Moriatsu, volume 2 (how to draw landscapes and plants), including how to draw different types of movement in water and flowers in the summer.

Happy August! And it’s National Dog Month!

Here’s Peggy Guggenheim with a dog photographed by Man Ray.

Peggy Guggenheim With Dog Man Ray (American painter and photographer, 1890-1976) (artist) ca.1926 HOLLIS number: olvwork235314

We are deeply saddened by the passing of Betye Saar who passed away on July 26th, only four days before turning 100 years old.

Saar was a celebrated contemporary American artist (1926 - 2026) and leading figure of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s. Through visual storytelling, Saar’s assemblage work often confronts American racism, colonialism, and stereotypes of Black people in this country.

Communication for the creative mind.

From Art/Life!

You’ll always find something unexpected in these limited edition journals, published by Joe Cardella. You can view and flip through these journals in our Special Collections Study Room.

We think this is so much more fun than asking A.I. This is nourishment for the creative mind.

Art/life Published: [Santa Barbara, Calif. : Joe Cardella, -c2006. -v. 10, no. 4 25 v. : chiefly ill. ; 28 cm. Frequency note: Monthly (except. Jan.) English Began with 1981. Editor, <1983>-2006: Joe Cardella. Published in limited edition. HOLLIS number: 990087654310203941

The East Boston Tunnel was the first underwater subway in the United States. It opened for operation on December 30, 1904, after four years of construction that began on May 5, 1900. Starting in 1897, Boston was also the first city in the nation to operate a subway. The East Boston Tunnel connects East Boston, originally comprised of five islands, to “the mainland” city proper via a tunnel underneath Boston Harbor. The construction boosted real estate values for East Boston areas and shortened the commute time significantly from anywhere between 45 minutes and an hour and a half via ferry ride to only 7 minutes on a streetcar. At the time, the cost for a round-trip was 12 cents. The East Boston Tunnel is still being used today by the MBTA’s Blue Line. (Summarized from Massachusetts Historical Society’s website: A Late Christmas Gift for East Boston.)

“Semilla de Sol” (English translation: Seed of the Sun) by Santiago Robles (b. 1984 in Mexico City) is about so many things—the conjugation of confrontation, juxtaposition of two ancestral figures related to the feminine and the masculine, multiple meanings of the seed and the sun as the origin of life and the ideal of civilization, and pre-Hispanic magical-mythological thought and overwhelming intervention of American culture in Latin American society and imagination. In “Semilla de Sol,” Mexico appears as an ambiguous, contradictory and amorphous community, without a legible face or voice, and corn appears as a transvestite in Virgin Mary, War Granada, Cosmic Uterus, Transgenic Machinery, Seer Hand, Ixcamacuane and Death.

Just as water is associated with the earth, the wind is associated with the sun; here is the permanence of life; copulation, agriculture and miscegenation; the fertilization of a people and the cultivation of a destiny: water man, earth man, wind man, fire man, corn man, sun seed. (Summarized from Texto publicado originalmente en la versión impresa de la revista Tierra Adentro, agosto 2015, página 67).

Weaving many stories between imageries and texts, Robles invites the viewers to take all that in to process and investigate all these multiple meanings.

Grrr!

Guillermo Deisler (1940-1995) was a Chilean artist who worked in stage design, woodcut printing, visual poetry, and the early global mail art movement.

Deisler was born in Santiago, but spent most of his life in East Germany. In 1973, he was arrested during the military coup in Chile and was forced into exile. He lived in France and Bulgaria, but eventually settled in East Germany.

He created artist books and unique mail art using rubber stamps and poetic imagery, blending word and picture. In 1987, he launched UNI/vers(;), also known as the Peacedream project—an international mail art publication with 35 issues, bringing together visual and experimental poets from around the world.

This publication entitled “Grrr” is an invitation to create meaning of this word on your own.

The note from the publisher in Spanish is translated as below:

“Grrr grrrr gr grrrrrrr gr grrrrrrrrr gr……

We invite readers to create their own translation of this message.”

This publication is a facsimile reissue of Guillermo Deisler’s artist’s book made in Antofagasta, Chile in 1969, under the aegis of Ediciones Mimbre (1963-1973). The facsimile publication was produced by Naranja Publicaciones after 50 years of its first publication. 500 copies were made that maintain the narration of the original and different printing techniques such as risography, letterpress, screen printing and stamping have been mixed.

You will find this and other artists’ publishing collections in our Reading Room.

What caught our eye in this photograph were the beautifully hand-colored watermelons!

They sure look inviting during these hot summer days. But this print wasn’t originally a color print. It was a monochrome albumen print made from wet collodion or dry plate glass negative, and colors were added by Japanese artists or colorists using water-soluble pigments.

Introduced in Europe in the 1840s, the practice of hand coloring photographs became more refined and widespread in Japan. By the 1880s, it had become a common practice and a defining characteristic of Japanese tourist photography.

Visit Early Photography of Japan, a digital collection of more than 40 souvenir photograph albums and illustrated publications with over 2,000 images from Widener Library, the Fine Arts Library, and Harvard-Yenching Library. These images primarily document the early history of commercial photography in Japan and are representative of what is often called Japanese tourist photography or Yokohama shashin.

For the last day of National Oceans Month.

These vintage postcard images are from our Postcard Collection. We wish you were here!

June is also National River Month.

Basia Irland is an American artist, environmental activist, writer, and educator whose work and career focus on rivers and watersheds, water scarcity, climate change, ecological restoration and waterborne diseases.

In “What Rivers Know: Listening to the Voices of Global Waterways,” Irland asks, “What if rivers could talk and tell their stories?” and writes their stories as the voice of a river. Below text is one example from the publication, and the last image is the accompanying image for this river.

“According to geologists, I am one of the oldest rivers in the world, having flowed for millions of years. As an old-timer, I have a low gradient with slow erosion, whereas younger cousins flow more quickly, tumbling down to the sea carrying lots of sediment. My waters flow south to north for 218 miles and helped shape the Appalachian Mountains. I am the French Broad River, named by French settlers in the region centuries ago at a time when I was one of the two broad rivers in western North Carolina.

The Cherokee have a variety of names for me: Agiqua in the mountains, Zilicoah above Asheville, and Tahkeeosteh after Asheville. As with most indigenous groups around the world, the Cherokee go to the river to pray and perform submergence ceremonies. The phrase “going to water” in the Cherokee language is synonymous with the words for bathing and submerging. Historically, the tribe recognized my floods as a natural part of any river’s cycle and did not attempt to dam or divert my waters. They knew, too, that I brought rich soil for agriculture when I flooded, and fresh sand for floors of their dwellings.” (from “What Rivers Know” – p.57)

Irland, Basia, Lucy R. Lippard, and Sandra Postel. 2025. What Rivers Know : Listening to the Voices of Global Waterways. First edition. Texas A&M University Press.

June is National Ocean Month. Here are some close-ups from an artists’ book entitled There is an ocean by Joshua Beckman.

In the words of the artist, this book portrays the high stakes of letting oneself go, of the inherent tension and displaced youth of the young, especially young gay men.

Check out the books for Pride Month in the Reading Room!

This display doesn’t concern itself with categories or labels that we often use to describe the boundaries of our identities. Queerness defies definition, boundary, and convention. How can we categorize in a single display that which defies easy categorization–that which often defines itself and contradicts its own determination in the same glorious breath?

Instead, our display invites you to explore the books here, think about how labels overlap, contradict, and how people categorize themselves, but more than anything come together in love. Some of the books here contain images of self-harm and accounts of violence. Queer history is at times violent and painful, but it bears that pain alongside great love and joy. The art surrounding queerness reflects this.

Books in this display are available to borrow for Harvard ID holders.

“When I went to art school, a neighbor said, ‘Some of the people in the art school just don’t work at all. Lazy buggers.’ And I said, ‘Oh, I am going to work, don’t worry.” And I did. “I knew when I was very young that gay people hid things and I didn’t want to do that I thought: ‘Well, I’m just going to be an artist, I have to be honest.” “Love is the only serious subject.” “Drawing makes you see clearer and clearer, and clearer still.” “I draw flowers every day on my iPad and send them to my friends so they get fresh blooms every morning.” “Artists, even when they’re dead, are alive in their work.”

Quotes are from “The World According to David Hockney”

In remembrance of David Hockney, who passed away at the age of 88 on June 11th, 2026, the Fine Arts Library is showcasing selected publications about his work in the Pride Month Books display in the Reading Room. Elsewhere in the Reading Room, you will also see what is featured in the video—an accordion book entitled “David Hockney: A Year in Normandie” that we have spread out for viewing.  

David Hockney (July 9, 1937 – June 11, 2026) was a British painter known for his vivid and stylized portraits, sunny scenes from his time spent in Los Angeles, and bold landscapes. His subjects were deeply personal—often his friends, loved ones, parents, and later, his dachshund friends Stanley and Boodgie. Hockney was openly gay. He painted his lovers and naked young men, but also imbued male desire in various other images and celebrated gay life—intimacy, love, friendships, beauty, and desires—without explicitly describing them. In his work, they were felt as a constant presence in the air, and he captured them with love.

Since the beginning of 2019, Hockney made his home in Normandy, France. He had been using an iPad for a decade in his work, but during the pandemic, he focused on the surrounding countryside, creating more than 100 images on his iPad in just a few weeks.

On National Photography Day.

From early days, photographs were used to teach the history of art and architecture. Since the 1880s, lantern slides were used for teaching, and then in the mid 1930s, the 35mm slide was introduced one year after the invention of Kodachrome, Kodak's three-color process. 35mm slides were vital for teaching - think of today’s PowerPoint!

Since the founding of the Fogg Art Museum in 1895, the Fine Arts Library has served the needs of teaching faculty, art museum staff, undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and historians at Harvard and around the world. By 1920s, many universities had slide libraries, including Harvard. Since then, FAL has acquired over 600,000 35 mm slides, mainly from the courses taught by Harvard faculty over the decades.

Caramate is a vintage slide projector. Instead of using a standard slide projector to project images onto a screen for group viewing, the Caramate allowed individual users to quickly check the images and make sure that slides were inserted into a carousel in the right direction and correct orientation.