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Gilded Fish: Illustrations of Histoire naturelle des dorades de la Chine c.1780
Stunning illustrations from the first monograph on goldfish published in Europe.
They’ve been casual prizes at fairground games; the lesser alternative to puppies or kittens; and idiomatically (and incorrectly) accused of having limited memory capacity. The forty-eight plates that follow the text include eighty-eight kinds of fish in beautiful hand-coloured golds, greens, browns, and blues, floating ephemerally above “watery” cyan backgrounds. The book came into existence as a luxury product produced by global connections and the resources of the French court, which would itself be abruptly dismantled just nine years after Histoire naturelle was published, when France erupted in revolution.
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