Fine Arts Library

On World Ocean Day.

“What we enjoyed most on Awashima Island was the chance to spend time along the shore and discover the ocean. We learnt to dive there, and were amazed by the strange and beautiful creatures we encountered. Most of them we had never seen before. But even here, so far from home, we recognized some of the creatures. This was both surprising and comforting, and it got us thinking—aren’t all living things related in some way? It’s water that connects marine life in Awashima to the freshwater life in Ganjad. Around the world we use different languages and give different names to seas and oceans, but they’re all related. Most rivers flow into the sea, and common currents connect nature and people to each other.” – from The deep, for the text Arun Wolf and Gita Wolf from an oral narrative by Mayur Vayeda and Tushar Vayeda.)

The Vayeda brothers tell their journey from an indigenous Warli community in Maharashtra, western India, growing up in the village of Ganja, to a small Japanese island called Awashima. They connect the village stream they knew from their childhood to the deep oceans they encountered in Awashima.

Happy National Photography Month!

Ferrotype (also known as Tintype) photographs were made with inexpensive materials (thin sheets of iron coated with a dark lacquer) and were quick to produce. After it was introduced in 1853 by Adolphe Alexandre Martin (1824-1896), this photographic process became very popular and was used in the U.S. until the early 1940s.

This publication entitled The Ferrotype, and How to Make It from 1872 includes two sample ferrotype photographs inside the book. Since ferrotypes/tintypes are one-of-a-kind photographs, this means that each copy differs from each other and are as unique as the ferrotypes themselves. You can view the same publication digitally on HathiTrust, and you will see ferrotype photographs of different women from the library’s copy.

KnitKnit is an artist's publication founded in 2002 by artist Sabrina Gschwandtner. This limited run of seven issues is dedicated to the intersection of traditional craft and contemporary art. Each issue has a limited edition knitted, crocheted, or sewn fabric sleeve.

This Issue, #4, was designed by Kevin O’Neill and includes a special cover made by multimedia artist and knitwear designer Liz Collins. Other artists and contributors include Lisa Anne Auerbach, David Basken, Lisa Bennett, Tanya Bezreh, Scott Bodenner, Tim Brown, Emily Drury, Staceyjoy Elkin, Lise Hosein, Lovid (comprised of Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus), Jeaneen Lund, Bridget Marrin, microRevolt, Taylor Painter-Wolfe, Christopher Ryan Ross, Kathryn Ruppert-Dazai, Kate Scott, Megan Whitmarsh, Alice Wu, and Ninh Wysocan. 

This item can be seen in the Fine Arts Library display Woven Worlds: The Contemporary Tradition of Storytelling through Weaving. 

Basia Irland’s Ice Books are for rivers and stream ecosystems, not for libraries (water and libraries don’t mix well.)

Basia Irland (b. 1946) works with communities to foster collaborations – with rivers and with each other. In her Ice Receding/Books Reseeding, she creates ice sculptures in the shape of books, filling the ice with local riparian seeds selected in consultation with botanists and stream ecologists for each specific riparian zone. She then releases these seed-laden ephemeral ice sculptures into rivers.  

The Ice Books are hand-carved ice sculptures, some weighing over 300-pounds. They emphasize the necessity of communal effort, scientific knowledge, and artistic expression to focus on complex issues of climate disruption and watershed restoration. The ephemeral sculptures are launched into waterways during community events, and sometimes from a flotilla of kayaks. As the ice melts the seeds are released to help repair nearby riverbanks. The first Ice Book was created for an exhibition in Boulder, Colorado, to make visible the fact that the Arapaho Glacier is melting, as are glaciers around the world.

Irland writes, “When an ecosystem is restored and the plants grow along the riverbanks they give back to us by helping sequester carbon, mitigating floods and drought, pollinating other plants, dispersing seeds, holding the banks in place (slowing erosion), creating soil regeneration and preservation, acting as filters for pollutants and debris, supplying leaf-litter (for food and habitat), promoting aesthetic pleasure, and providing shelter/shade for riverside organisms including humans.” 

Happy Earth Day!

Art has the power to foster emotional connection and deeper understanding for people with what is happening to our planet. For Earth Month, the Fine Arts Library is highlighting artists whose work center on the environment, ecology, climate crisis, and climate action in our special display, Calling for Action: Books for Earth Month!

One of the early pioneers in the Ecological art movement was Agnes Denes (b. 1931), who began working on ecological projects in the late 1960s. Her best-known work was Wheatfield - A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan (1982), which addressed larger issues around social, economic, and ethical practice on land. Denes planted, grew, and harvested wheat on a 2-acre lot located in a landfill in lower Manhattan, two blocks from Wall Street and the World Trade Center, facing the Statue of Liberty.  On August 16, 1982, the crop was harvested, yielding over 1000 pounds of healthy, golden wheat. The work addressed greed and misplaced priorities, highlighting the mismanagement of land, food, waste, world hunger, and ecological concerns.  

This publication entitled Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis highlights the ways in which artists seek to reframe and deepen our psychological and spiritual responses to the Earth, ecology, and the climate crisis. As Nigerian-born visual artist Otobong Nkanga says, “caring is a form of resistance.”

These cherry trees by our building all blossomed last Tuesday. This was our beloved former colleague, András Riedlmayer’s favorite tree. András sadly passed away this past February. These beautiful cherry blossom bring us many fond memories of András.

Archnet, a digital library put together a wonderful tribute to András’ legacy, and we want to share it.

The January-February 2026 Issue of the Harvard Magazine featured an article about Daniel Mendoza, England’s first sports megastar in the late 1700s. This lithograph image is a part of the Fine Arts Library’s “Portraits of boxers and other athletes” collection. Evert Jansen Wendell (A.B. Harvard 1882) was an avid sportsman in his student days. In later life, he collected sporting images among thousands of other portrait images and upon his death donated them to his alma mater. The featured image captures a 72-round bout on September 20th in 1790 between Daniel Mendoza and Richard Humphreys, who was Mendoza’s mentor-turned-rival.

Mendoza was a very popular prizefighter and published two books on the subject (The Art of Boxing and The Modern Art of Boxing) and played a key role in advancing scientific technique in boxing. His first fight occurred by accident when he was just 16 and working for a tea dealer. One day in 1780, a dispute arose between the tea dealer and a porter over payment for a consignment of tea and the porter challenged the owner to a duel with fists. Mendoza stepped in for his frail employer, believing that the porter was cheating. The fight took place in the street within a hastily constructed ring and lasted for 45 minutes, ending when the porter was declared unable to continue.

This facsimile of The Royal Psalter of Sainte-Chapelle, an illuminated manuscript originally made in Paris in the early thirteenth century, is filled with a delightful variety of geometric, floral, and zoomorphic line fillers.

Medieval scribes and artists filled the empty space between lines with humor, providing a break from often serious texts and also creating visual balance and symmetry. We suspect that they must have had a lot of fun creating these quirky creatures.

The Fine Arts Library holds a collection of over 300 full-color facsimiles of illuminated manuscripts from a wide range of periods and traditions. The collection primarily includes religious texts, but representatives of secular works on poetry and literature, astronomy, travel, sketchbooks, and science and medicine are also included.

Here’s our first post in a series from our current exhibit, “Woven Worlds: The Contemporary Tradition of Storytelling through Weaving.” We will be sharing a series of posts to explore each of the included artworks in more depth.

Rhiannon ‘Skye’ Tafoya (b. 1989) is an interdisciplinary artist from the Eastern Band of Cherokee and the Santa Clara Pueblo Tribes.

She employs printmaking, digital design, and basketry techniques in creating her artist’s books, prints, and paper weavings. Both of her Tribal heritages, cultures, and lineages are manifested in her two- and three-dimensional artworks that range in size from a few inches to a few feet. She is inspired by her family history of basketry and observing her father and maternal grandmother weave baskets from red willow, honeysuckle vine, and white oak. While her inspiration comes, in part, from Cherokee traditions, her artworks are decidedly contemporary, featuring sharp lines and bold colors.

Skye creates to preserve, archive, and share personal and familial stories, cultural knowledge, and the Cherokee language. (from the artist’s website)

Weaving is integral to storytelling across the globe. This exhibit highlights the many ways in which Indigenous and diasporic communities use weaving to support lifeways, record history, and celebrate culture. Weaving is a diverse practice traversing fiber arts, basketry, beadwork, and more. The exhibit is open to Harvard ID holders only.

In 1848, a Nagasaki merchant, Ueno Shunnojo, imported the first daguerreotype camera through the Dutch trading post of Deshima.

Photography developed slowly in Japan due to the technical demands, lack of instruction, and difficulty in obtaining the necessary equipment and supplies. However, with the arrival of a new era of Meiji in 1868, photography flourished. During this period, travel restrictions were eased and foreign tourists began to flock to Japan. Photographs became popular souvenirs and a prosperous market emerged for Japanese tourist photography. Ironically, these world travelers, including many notable Americans from New England, were more interested in traditional Japanese culture than the dramatic transformation of Japanese society that was taking place around them.

Japanese tourist photography became popular for these world travelers who wanted to preserve not only their experiences of Japan but also their romanticized views of Japan.

Felice Beato (1832–1909), an Italian–British war photographer arrived in Japan in 1863 and established one of the earliest commercial photography studios in Yokohama where he marketed his views of Japan and Japanese people to Westerners. Beato influenced the early photography of Japan and popularized what became the most distinguishing characteristics of Japanese tourist photography, the practices of hand coloring photographs and mounting them in albums. Many Japanese photographers followed in Beato’s footsteps, including Tamamura Kozaburo, Kusakabe Kimbei, and Ogawa Kazamasu. As a result, Japanese tourist photography also became known as “Yokohama shashin” or Yokohama-style photography.

A practice of hand coloring photographs was introduced in Europe in the 1840s, but it was refined by Japanese photographers. By the 1880s, it had become a common practice and a defining characteristic of Japanese tourist photography.

Early Photography of Japan is a virtual collection of more than 40 souvenir photograph albums and illustrated publications with over 2,000 images. Check out the collections.

Today’s drawing lesson is how to draw a dog!

This self-instructing drawing manual entitled “The Youth’s New London Self-Instructing Drawing Book: containing A Series of Progressive Lessons, with Instructions for Drawing Rural Scenery, Architecture, the Human Figure, Animals, etc.” was published in 1839 and illustrated by Nathaniel Whittock (1791-1860), who was a prolific writer of instruction books on drawings and other subjects.

Now follow these instructions.

“Commence the outline with the skull, which is that part of the drawing beginning at the ear and ending at the top of the nose. Make a number of very faint outlines, till you are certain that you have obtained a correct one; then proceed with the nose, bringing the line down to form the right jaw. Afterwards, draw the outline of the end of the tongue and the fore teeth, bringing the line under the jaw to the throat. In forming this outline do not think any thing about drawing a dog, but suppose you are drawing the exact shape of some inanimate mass placed before you. ..”

Following our previous post on historical women’s fashion from Japan, here’s a publication featuring women from the Meiji period. It is illustrated by Ikeda Terukata, who was known for bijin-ga (美人画), which literally means "beautiful person picture." Bijin is a term mostly used to refer to beautiful women; bijin-ga is a genre of Japanese woodblock prints and paintings.

This accordion-style publication features colorful illustrations on both sides, depicting women in “today’s style” during the Meiji period.