The Good Luck Fish

The Public Domain Review has published some lovely illustrations of goldfish from a 1780 monograph called Histoire naturelle des dorades de la Chine.

Histoire naturelle des dorades de la Chine (1780) — the dorades in the title refers not to sea bream but the fish’s gilded appearance — was the first monograph on goldfish published in Europe, from a time when the fish were still bound up with Eastern exoticism in the Western imagination.

You can peruse the entire document at the Internet Archive.

• art
• fish
• illustration