Fantastic Beasts of the Nineteenth Century: Dragons, Birds, and Incredible Sea Creatures

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.

Munich painter Anton Seder was the first director of the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (College of Decorative Arts), founded in 1890, where he served until 1920. Strasbourg had been ceded by France to Germany in 1871 and was returned to France in 1918; therefore, the cultural environment was a mixture of French and German influences. Seder co-edited the magazine Das Kunstgewerbe in Elsass-Lothringen (The Arts and Crafts in Alsace-Lorraine). His designs were also included in many periodicals of decorative arts designs, issued as chromolithographs. Seder’s best known separate works are Die Pflanze in Kunst und Gewerbe (The Plant in Art and Trade), which incorporated plants into decorative motifs, and Das Thier in Der Decorativen Kunst (Animals in Decorative Art), similarly incorporating animals and mythical dragons into decorative motifs.