A Beginner's Pictorial Encyclopedia of Natural History (Ehon shaho bukuro)

Held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1794 second edition of an original 1761 publication, A Beginner's Pictorial Encyclopedia of Natural History (Ehon shaho bukuro 絵本写宝袋) is a three-volume woodblock-printed book that functioned as a comprehensive natural-history primer in the e-tehon tradition Morikuni had helped to establish. Published more than a decade after his death in 1748, the book belongs to the substantial body of posthumous Morikuni publications that carried his reputation and pictorial vocabulary into the second half of the eighteenth century. The Met's set, printed in ink on paper and bound in Japanese style, preserves the impressions of the 1794 second edition, demonstrating both the staying power of Morikuni's name in the commercial Kamigata publishing market and the continuing demand for the kind of category-organized illustrated encyclopedia he had pioneered with the Morokoshi kinmō zui of 1719. As a natural-history reference for amateur painters and ordinary readers, the Ehon shaho bukuro gathers plants, animals, and other natural subjects into the systematic, copyable arrangements that defined the genre and that allowed users to study and reproduce Kanō-derived bird-and-flower and animal compositions without direct studio access. The book represents the late flowering of the e-tehon project Morikuni had spent his career developing and confirms his enduring posthumous influence on the early-modern Japanese illustrated book.