Drie gele chrysanten. Photomechanical print.

This large AI-assisted collection comprises about 60,000 images of botanical drawings and illustrations. It spans from the 14th to 19th century. As of today, we estimate the total number of botanical illustrations in our archive as 200,000 and growing. The "golden age" of botanical illustration is generally considered to be the 18th and 19th centuries, a time when there was a great deal of interest in botany and a proliferation of botanical illustrations being produced. During this period, many of the great botanical illustrators of the time, such as Maria Sybilla Merian, Pierre-Joseph Redouté, and John James Audubon, were active and produced some of the most iconic and influential botanical illustrations of all time. In addition to being used for scientific purposes, botanical illustrations were also highly prized for their beauty and were often used to decorate homes and other public spaces. Many of the most famous botanical illustrations from this period are still admired and collected today for their beauty and historical significance. All large Picryl collections were made possible with the development of neural image recognition. We made our best to reduce false-positive image recognition to under 5%.

Ogawa Kazumasa (1860–1929) was a Japanese photographer, printer, and publisher who was instrumental in the development of the collotype process in Japan. He was born in Tokyo and began his career as a photographer in the 1880s, working primarily in the studio of Ueno Hikoma. In 1888, he founded his own photography studio, the Ogawa Shashin Seihanjo, which became one of the most successful and influential studios in Japan. In addition to his work as a photographer, Ogawa was also a skilled printer and publisher. He was one of the first photographers in Japan to experiment with the collotype process, a printing technique that allowed for high-quality reproductions of photographs. He established the Tokyo Collotype Company in 1894, which became one of the leading printing companies in Japan. Ogawa was also an important figure in the development of the art of photogravure in Japan. He published a number of books featuring photogravure prints, including "The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido" (1896) and "The Flowers of Japan" (1899). These books were highly influential and helped to establish photogravure as a respected art form in Japan. Throughout his career, Ogawa was committed to promoting photography as an art form and to preserving traditional Japanese culture through his work. He died in 1929, but his legacy continues to influence Japanese photography and printing to this day.