The Study Of Meiyuan Botanical Art

Meiyuan Botanical Art is a masterpiece in the series of naturalist Atlas works of a naturalist and painter MouriMeiyuanin the late Edo period of Japan,whose academic value is worthy of attention.1.Great quotation of Chinese traditional herbalismbooks such as Compendium of Materia Medica,Famine relief Materia Medica,reflects that Japanese culture during the Edo period id still deeply influenced by sinology.2.Influenced by Dutch learning,there's obvious participation of western painting techniques and it aims to improve realism for the pursuit of in pursuit of practical Atlas.3.Based on Chinese Materia Medica system,atlas and annotation have eliminated the pharmaceutical ingredients so as to purify them as the illustrations of nature history.4.Through on-site picking and self-planting specimens,the content of the atlas have been changed locally.Contrast to modern Japanese herbalism experts such as Ono and Iwasaki who have drawn attention in the specialty field,Mouriand his work have never entered such a circle for a long time.However,the features and value of his atlas have recently come to the stage of Japanese academic circle,and then status of his nature history atlas is improving in accordance with the expansion of research.Based on the careful interpretation of Meiyuan Botanical Art(four volumes),the main content of the study are listed as follows:1.To sort out background and academic origins of Meiyuan Botanical Artamong enormous Sino-Japanese literature,Materia Medica and plant Atlas during the Edo period have experienced three stages.The early stage basically copied Chinese Materia Medica,when the mid-term began to pay attention to the Japanese plants and got preliminary influence of Western learning,and the late stage basically completed varieties localization and western transformation of Atlas.2.There's nothing known about the life of Meiyuan,and since Rocky Shoko and Nakata have done many textual researches and corrected predecessors' mistakes.Grounded on the commentary on main arguments,this paper has referred to other historical materials and then conduct a comparative analysis,and further puts forward a more reasonable viewpoint.3.This paper puts the emphasis of study on the tradition Chinese Materia Medica's influence on Meiyuan Botanical Art and then extracts the reference one by one and makes a statistic analysis and focus on the time,types of Chinese Materia Medica works.Therefore this paper conducts a special analysis upon that.4.The historic academic situation is worthy of concern that the introduction of "Dutch painting" and transformation of circumstances that traditional Chinese Materia Medicaputs language before paintings and the atlas is brief and impractical made by Japanese Edo scholars.When giving analysis and comments on the typical features of in this aspect,this paper will also discuss the reasons why the illustrations in traditional Chinese Materia Medica works are also brief.The present author hopes that through Meiyuan Botanical Art such a text,this paper can make a micro-inspection according to what have been mentioned above so as to demonstrate numerous clear lines of modern Sino-Japanese scientific and cultural exchanges,academic exchanges among the east and west as well as transformation of modern history.