Mori Sosen (1747-1821) Japanese Painter, Edo Period

The painter is best known for his paintings of monkeys and other animals and birds. For most of his life Mori Sosen had lived in Osaka where he founded a school of animal painting with his brother.

When a gibbon was brought in Japan by the Dutch in 1809, creating somewhat of a sensation (gibbons had long been depicted by Japanese artists, based on Chinese paintings of the animal, but no one in Japan had seen a live gibbon for centuries), it was Mori who had created a graphic record of this event as well.

The artist even changed the first character of his name to one meaning 'monkey' when he was 61.

Mori Sosen -A Peacock (18th c, Edo period). Color and ink on silk

Eyvind Earle (1916-2000) American Artist and Illustartor

Eyvind Earle was born in New York. In two years his family moved to Hollywood. He started painting at the age of 10. Once his father gave him a challenging choice: read 50 pages of a book or paint a picture every day. Earle chose both. When Earle was 14, he had his first one-man show in France. Since then the young artist's fame had been consistently growing. After his very successful one-man show in New York (1937) when he was 21, one of his paintings was acquired by Metropolitan Museum for its permanent collection.

In 1951 he joined Disney as an assistant background painter and received credit for the experimental background painting in the Goofy short, For Whom the Bulls Toil.[3] In 1953 he created the look of Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom, a short animated film which won an Academy Award[2] and a Cannes Film Festival Award. He also worked on Peter Pan, Working for Peanuts, Pigs is Pigs, Paul Bunyan, and Lady and the Tramp. He was responsible for the styling, background, and colors for the high-acclaimed Sleeping Beauty.His artwork was the inspiration for the graphic style of Sony's first computer animated film, Open Season.

After about 15 years of creating animated art, Earle returned to painting full-time in 1966. He continued to work rigorously until the end of his life. In addition to his watercolors, oils, sculptures, drawings, and scratchboards, Earle began making limited-edition serigraphs in 1974. Earle had a completely original perception of landscape.

"For 70 years I've painted paintings, and I'm constantly and everlastingly overwhelmed at the stupendous infinity of nature," Earle wrote in 1996. "Wherever I turn and look, there I see creation. Art is creating. Art is the search for truth."