These just tickle my fancy, mostly based on what I’m imagining they’re about. You can find them on the Library of Congress website, prints and photographs collection, and reading the notes, you will find they are Japanese woodcuts, dated “between 1850 and 1900,” donated by a Mrs. E. Crane Chadbourne to the Sackler Gallery of Art in 1930.
I imagine the prints to be part of the society-wide remaking of Japan before, during, and after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, when the Japanese “westernized” themselves with a vengeance. One of the prints has typewritten notes at the bottom, indicating that the “Department of Education” was somehow involved. These prints are the equivalent of medieval morality plays and Soviet posters from the 1920’s; they are proselytizing pieces of propaganda, intending to teach the viewer how to think about things. They were trying to create a new ethos. An “innovation nation” perhaps? Yes, but the real thing, not the pro-“entrepeneurship” schlock that seems to ooze from every corner of the corporate media machine nowadays.
What I find funny is that all of these Western inventors/innovators seem to be beseiged or a little crazy in every woodcut: are we really supposed to emulate them?
James Watt,
Inventor of the Steam Engine
Bernard Palissy,
Inventor of Enamelled Pottery
See Palissy’s Wikipedia entry:
At times he and his family were reduced to poverty; he burned his furniture and even, it is said, the floor boards of his house to feed the fires of his furnaces. Meanwhile, he endured the reproaches of his wife, who, with her little family clamouring for food, evidently regarded her husband’s endeavors as little short of insanity.
Richard Arkwright,
Inventor of Spinning Machiney
Thomas Carlyle,
Author and Historian
John James Audubon,
Bird Naturalist
John Heathcoat,
Inventor of the Knitting Machine
