“The Frenchman Palissy wanted to make nice china. His wife and kids got very upset with him when he started throwing their furniture into the kiln(?) to feed it. But finally he succeeded.”

Featured on PDR in the collection Japanese Prints of Western Inventors, Artists and Scholars (1873)

A set of prints depicting famous Western inventors and scholars which seem to have been produced by the Japanese Department of Education. Although The Library of Congress only gives a rough date for them, between 1850 and 1900, the University of Tsukuba Library mentions a more specific 1873, a year which would make sense given the intense period of "westernisation" going on in Japan at this time, a presumed motive behind the making of the prints depicting such stalwarts of the industrial revolution in the West as James Watt and Richard Arkwright.