Watanabe Shōtei

The work of the Nihonga painter, Watanabe Shōtei, reflects the influence of the Parisian art scene he experienced in the late 1870s as one of the few Japanese artists living in Paris. We know his work primarily from a series of albums published at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including this volume with studies of birds and flowers.

It is unfortunate that the Hathi Trust has chosen to digitize volumes of Shōtei’s work as individual pages rather than two-page spreads, as they were originally designed.