Nature, War and the Art of the Detmold Twins

The Detmold twins, Edward Julius Detmold in particular, quietly created a new culture of seeing and regenerated the meaning of nature for audiences through their much-loved illustrations. The twins challenged the divisions between nature and culture, East and West, products of capitalist modernity. Edward’s ingenious hands rendered illustrations of birds, insects, and trees into vivid moments of still animation. Hidden between the dusty covers of antiquarian books by Kipling, Maeterlinck, and Fabre, Edward’s achievements and the role played by illustrators for early twentieth-century society are revealed by the discerning eye of the historian Tessa Morris-Suzuki. Her penetrating research reveals how these illustrations can lead us to see the world around us for the better.

Professor Sho Konishi, Director of the the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies, University of Oxford, author of Anarchist Modernity.


This biography of the enigmatic Detmold Twins - orphans, prodigies, visionaries, seclusionists, suicides - not only shows Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s broad vision and profound insight as a historian, but also reflects her efforts as a thinker to draw nourishment from historical facts to think about and criticize current reality. In this way, the personal story of the twin artists has become a living history. This book not only re-examine the orientalism, anti-modernism, and anti-war thoughts between the two world wars, but also includes the visual culture study of the golden age of illustration. With vast and informative historical materials, plus interesting and vivid writing, it is well worth reading!

Ou Ning, artist, curator, and author of The Agritopianists.In “Nature, War and the Art of the Detmold Twins: Oriental Dreams: Modernity’s Nightmares”, Tessa Morris-Suzuki takes readers on a fascinating journey that reveals new perspectives on the enigmatic lives of the two early 20th century prodigies in the field of book illustration, Edward Julius and Charles Maurice Detmold. Their early works, Pictures of Birdland (1899) and illustrations of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, earned them wide recognition at the time. Like Morris-Suzuki herself, many of us will recall Edward’s illustrations in The Arabian Nights (1924). With her characteristically astute and meticulous historian’s eye, Morris-Suzuki uncovers new details about their lives (and the early death of Maurice), but she doesn’t stop there. She goes on to probe the gaps and omissions in narratives about their early lives and the later career of Edward Detmold whose experiences during the First World War led him to become a conscientious objector, produce anti-war art, and unique philosophical writings. Along the way, she touches on complex ways in which the brothers’ early works intersected with contemporary movements, and Edward’s later work, much of which has been ignored by art historians, can be better understood in connection with anti-war art by his contemporaries, pacifism, and even movements for nature conservation that were emerging in early 20th-century Japan. This study not only sheds light on the art of the Detmold twins, but also situates them in the context of larger questions about art, nature, and war. Morris-Suzuki asks us to pause, and look more closely at “the fantastically intricate texture of a bird’s wing,” even as we are “brought face to face with the raw horrors of mass conflict haunted with the twentieth century, and which continue to overshadow our own age.

Rebecca Jennison, Professor Emerita, Kyoto Seika University, Co-editor of Imagination Without Borders: Feminist Artist Tomiyama Taeko and Social Responsibility.