Bajo el Signo de Libra – Page 2

Alexandre de Riquer book covers

A pair of cover designs by the very prolific Alexandre de Riquer (1856–1920), an illustrator and designer who might be described as the Catalan equivalent of Alphonse Mucha. It’s often the case with the artists of this period that you find one or two examples of their work in books but see little else. Riquer has better representation on the web than most. These are from a post at Bajo el Signo de Libra which features other cover designs while this site has many pages devoted to the artist’s paintings, bookplates, poster designs, decorative work and even his books of poetry.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Maruyama Okyo’s peacocks

Peacock and Peahen (18th c.).

I’ve had an untitled Japanese painting of a peacock as a desktop image for a while now, its origin forgotten, and I’ve wondered a few times who the artist was. A recent posting about Maruyama Okyo (1733–1795) at Bajo el Signo de Libra made me think that Okyo might be the artist responsible. As it turns out, he wasn’t, my bird is by one of his pupils, Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754–1799), and looks like a copy of the picture below. Mystery solved anyway, and the search gives me a good excuse to link to some of Okyo paintings. These differed from the prevailing style of the period, Okyo having studied Western artists and their methods in order to produce work which was more realistic than that of his contemporaries.