Thursday, January 26, 2006

Glover's Atlas








Thomas Albert Glover (more usually known as Tomisaburo Kuraba) was the son of a Scottish industrial entrepeneur in Japan, Thomas Blake Glover. Kuraba collected some 800 ocean specimens which were painted and catalogued by 5 artists in Nagasaki between 1912 and 1936 and bound into 32 volumes.

2 incidental pieces of trivia: Kuraba's step-mother was the inspiration for Puccini's Madame Butterfly; and Kuraba committed suicide following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WWII.

Glover's Atlas is on display at Nagasaki University. Despite no english it's easily navigable from multiple access symbols.

Fish Nagasaki have a smaller database with larger images, but it's an old site and I couldn't get any of the specimens to completely load.

I mentioned the atlas in passing previously - the links in that post lead to a wealth of Japanese natural history material.

[I cleaned up some background artifact in some of these - as a set, there is a lot of deterioration evident]

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