The visual library

scene:charcoal-tree Sky laid with the side of a vine stick and rubbed with a finger, sun and clouds lifted with a kneaded eraser, hill rubbed with a tissue, tree, grass and birds in compressed charcoal. · charcoal · kept

scene:crayon-meadow A maroon sun with rays, indigo clouds and a meadow coloured up and down, maroon flowers on black stems, a black bird; the wax skips the tooth and leaves the paper showing. · crayon · kept

scene:crayon-tangerines Maroon coloured in back and forth with a second pass on the shadow side and a spot of paper left for the shine, black outlines and table line, one indigo leaf. · crayon · study

scene:pastel-hibiscus Indigo leaves laid from the midrib out with the midrib left bare, maroon petals pressed thick at the heart and eased off toward the ruffled edge, a black stamen with dabs of pollen. · pastel · kept

scene:blossom An old limb in ink with dry-brush bark, blossoms in thinned maroon with fine stamens, falling petals, two swallows. · ink · kept

scene:sky Long loaded indigo strokes, each paler than the last, the lower ones running dry; clouds lifted out while wet with a crumpled tissue; one far bird in ink. · ink over wash · study

scene:creek Sky in long indigo strokes with a cloud lifted out; the far ridge one wet stroke of thinned ink; the creek laid bank to bank in horizontal strokes, a few darker ones glazed on; grass, field flowers and two birds with the brush. · ink over wash · study

scene:hibiscus Petals as loaded maroon presses from the throat out, two to a petal, every other petal laid after the first dried; the throat glazed deeper; leaves as boneless ink presses with a white midrib; the column and stem with the brush. · ink over wash · study

scene:tangerines After Muqi's Six Persimmons: each fruit one loaded press in a different strength of the same ink, the last only drawn; stems and calyxes with the brush; one boneless leaf. · ink over wash · study

scene:moon The sky laid in graded indigo strokes, the moon lifted out of it while wet with a folded tissue; a far shore in thinned ink; the water in horizontal strokes that stop short of the moon's path and break into dry brush near it; two geese in ink. · ink over wash · study

scene:swallows One loaded indigo sweep rising across the paper and running dry, a paler one under it; three swallows in ink on the paper above. · ink over wash · study

scene:mangoes Mangoes, after Muqi's Six Persimmons: the Chan way of seeing, with fruit from a Tamil kitchen. Each mango one press, fuller at the shoulder; the last only drawn. · ink over wash · study

collection:chola-and-pallava Chola and Pallava Two schools of the Tamil country, one after the other. Under the Pallava kings of Kanchipuram, from the 7th to the 9th century, sculptors cut whole shrines and a relief some thirty metres long out of the living granite at Mamallapuram, then built in dressed stone at the Shore Temple and the Kailasanatha; their rarer bronzes were already cast by lost wax. Under the Chola kings of Thanjavur, from the 9th century to the 13th, the bronze became the great form. The method is madhūcchiṣṭa vidhāna, the method of the wax: the image is modelled whole in beeswax, coated in layers of fine clay, the wax melted out and molten copper alloy poured into the space it leaves. The mould is broken to free the cast, so every bronze is the only one of its kind: art and engineering in one object, its proportions set by the canons of the śilpa texts and its casting a feat of metallurgy, a method still practised at Swamimalai on the Kaveri. Most were made to be carried in procession, and the holes and lugs on their bases took the poles. These are sacred images, many of their kind still worshipped in Tamil temples; they are shown here as the museums record them, with the stone of the Pallava school first, then a Pallava bronze, then the Chola bronzes.

collection:engineering-drawings Engineering drawings Machines and structures drawn so that someone else could build, run or check them, in date order: an automaton, a perspective device, a pendulum clock, a pin factory, a glassworks, a chemist's apparatus, a lighthouse, a calculating engine, a flying machine and a governor.

collection:ink-and-brush Ink and brush Ink on paper or silk, where much of the picture is empty space and each stroke is made once: two Zen paintings, splashed ink, an ink landscape, bamboo in rain, a plum branch, calligraphy, a gathering of poets, and a European painter's blot.

collection:japanese-prints Japanese prints Woodblock prints of the late Edo period, most by Hiroshige and Hokusai: snow, rain, mist, water and birds, made with a few blocks of colour and a great deal of restraint. Most of them also sit on a piece of writing on this site.

collection:maps-and-diagrams Maps and diagrams Pictures that make a hidden pattern visible, in date order: a model of the Earth's interior, the first road atlas, the first time-series chart, a map of southern India, Snow's cholera map, a star chart, Nightingale's roses, the survey triangles of India and a railway's day drawn as lines.

collection:posters-and-book-covers Posters, title pages and book art Public-domain printed matter in date order, where type and picture carry an idea together: the first printed Euclid, Galileo's Moon, Newton's and Darwin's title pages, a self-experimenter's frontispiece, a child's primer, Byrne's coloured Euclid and two American posters of the 1890s.

collection:scientific-plates Scientific plates Pictures made to record something true: a colony animal, the edge of the sun, a comet, snow crystals under a lens, plants drawn from root to seed, a sky studied as weather. Drawn by hand, mostly before a camera could hold what the eye saw.

collection:tamil-and-indian-heritage Tamil Nadu and Indian heritage The Tamil country in its own objects and in early records of it: Chola bronze and granite, a Thanjavur painting, Linnaeus Tripe's 1858 photographs of Thanjavur, Madurai and Srirangam, and the grains, plants and maps of the Coromandel coast.

diagram:feedback-loop A feedback loop Reference, error, controller, plant, output and measured feedback. The wash marks the block you design; the maroon point is where the output is taken. · tikz

diagram:causal-graph Two causes of one image Class Y and nuisance N are independent causes of the image X; a backbone that keeps a class part apart from a nuisance part. The wash marks the class part. · tikz

diagram:phase-portrait Phase portrait of a damped pendulum Direction field in pencil, two integrated trajectories in ink, the states that cannot go over the top in the wash, the resting equilibrium as the maroon point. Has a narrow drawing for phones. · mpl

diagram:transformer-block One transformer block A pre-norm block read from the bottom: layer norm, multi-head attention and a residual addition, then layer norm, feed-forward and a second addition. The wash marks attention, the only place tokens mix. · tikz

diagram:neural-layers A small neural network A multilayer perceptron: three inputs, four hidden units, two outputs, every weight a pencil line. The wash marks the hidden layer; the maroon unit is the prediction. · tikz

diagram:attention-map Where each word looks One head's attention weights over a six-word sentence with a causal mask, in indigo only: more weight, more pigment. The maroon point is the strongest link between two different words. The weights are illustrative; replace them with a real head's. · mpl

diagram:graphical-model A mixture model in plate notation Mixing weights choose a component for each of N points; each point is drawn from one of K means. Plates in pencil; the observed variable carries the wash. · tikz

diagram:agent-environment The agent and its world The reinforcement-learning loop of a Markov decision process: action out, state and reward back. The wash marks the agent; the maroon point is the reward. · tikz

diagram:commutative-square A square that commutes Equivariance drawn with tikz-cd: transform then map equals map then transform, f(g·x) = g·f(x). The maroon corner is where both paths arrive. · tikz

diagram:timeline Learning without forgetting, 2016 to 2026 A vertical timeline of continual-learning methods by first publication: LwF, EWC, iCaRL, DER++, FeCAM, NSM-LW. The wash marks the span of heads built from class statistics with no stored images; NSM-LW is the maroon point. · tikz