Ashmolean Eastern Art Online, Yousef Jameel Centre for Islamic and Asian Art

Shiba Kōkan began his career as a painter working in the Kanō style and later studied with Sō Shiseki, who specialized in realistic Chinese-style bird-and-flower paintings. Kōkan was fascinated by Western science and painting techniques, learning from books acquired from the Dutch in Nagasaki, and taught himself how to make copper-plate engravings. After observing insects through a microscope, a rarity in Japan at the time, he wrote ‘all creatures on earth, even the tiniest insects have nerves, ears, eyes and limbs, just as humans have’.