Dover Fine Art, History of Art Fantastic Beasts of the Nineteenth Century: Dragons, Birds, and Incredible Sea Creatures, (Paperback)

Fanciful creatures slither, swim, and soar through this full-color adaptation of a rare 19th-century German portfolio. The colorful images include exotic birds and fishes, dramatic reptiles and amphibians, and scores of ferocious dragons. This new layout of a hard-to-find antique volume presents enlargements of the original illustrations that offer magnified details of stylized feathers, fins, scales, and other fantastic features. The tremendous variety of these images makes this volume a perfect resource for all manner of graphics and art reference.
This meticulously reproduced collection of fanciful creatures represents the first republication of Anton Seder's bestiary since the original 1896 edition. The Munich-based painter is best known for Die Pflanze in Kunst und Gewerbe (The Plant in Art and Trade), which incorporated plants into decorative patterns, and Das Thier in Der Decorativen Kunst (Animals in Decorative Art), which similarly integrated animals and mythical dragons into ornamental motifs. Designers, artists, and crafters will appreciate Seder's imaginative works and their distinctive combination of outstanding designs with keen observations of nature.