1,300 Beautiful Wildlife Illustrations from the 19th Century Now Restored

https://www.openculture.com/2026/07/explore-1300-beautiful-wildlife-illustrations-from-the-19th-century.html

by gslin • 7 days ago

258 50 7 days ago

Source posted some days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48850978 and blog https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48850987

Animats• 7 days ago

Soon to be ingested for AI training.

yaur• 7 days ago

Can someone build a classifier that will tell is which of these images was drawn with a living, dead, or (charitably) dissected specimen?

embedding-shape• 7 days ago

I'm looking through https://www.c82.net/naturalists-library/illustrations and all the illustrations seems to be of non-dissected animals/insects, at the illustration themselves. Of course, impossible to know if the illustration was drawn from a dead or alive specimen, but none of them seems based on anything picked apart as far as I can tell.

As an example, all the drawn butterflies seems to be drawn as if they were alive, not dead (https://www.emilydamstra.com/please-enough-dead-butterflies/).

noduerme2• 7 days ago

Unclear from the text: Was AI used in modifying or filling any images in the restoration process?

smallnix• 7 days ago

Not only did AI tools then help him unearth needed sources and fill in visual gaps

I think that's clear

noduerme2• 7 days ago

I took that to mean filling in the gaps on the source data, not literally filling in pen and ink gaps in the drawing. If so, that's a shame. It pollutes the original and isn't what counts as restoration.

Cthulhu_• 7 days ago

More at https://www.c82.net/blog/making-of-naturalists-library, you can see that the source material was actually in pretty good condition, just aged and yellowed; they used Photoshop's AI to stitch drawings that were spread out over two pages together. And probably some upscaling.

ZeroGravitas• 7 days ago

That link has a big section on their use of AI that ends with:

Overall, AI played a critical role in many aspects of this project for things I couldn’t do myself but the vast majority of the work was done manually the “old fashioned way” from creating the design and writing the code to restoring each plate and formatting all the text to designing the book and posters. I have no doubt that a lot more could have been done with AI but I still enjoy putting in the elbow grease to create something just the way I want.

Ylano2• 6 days ago

AI was used to "fill in visual gaps"

ButlerianJihad• 7 days ago

Remember when it was totally controversial that Ted Turner intended to colorize classic films such as Casablanca, and how technology was going to ruin artistry in this way? Good times.

nephihaha• 7 days ago

I don't like most of the colourisations of old films. I try and seek out the black and white versions when I can. B&W is a different medium from colour.

digikazi• 7 days ago

I'm assuming it is quite nice, but terrible adverts popping up all over the place and distracting from the overall experience, so I only skimmed through it before I closed the window (on a work computer hence no adblock!)

Here's something similar from The Guardian, but without the ads:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/18/natural-...

Flow• 7 days ago

If you’re on iOS, get Wipr adblocker. The page was very clean för me. No ads.

dspillett• 6 days ago

but without the ads

Do you subscribe?

I get “accept all stalky ad-tech or subscribe”. Even the subscription is only referred to as “ad lite” not “ad free”.

ilt• 7 days ago

Direct link to the library instead of the blog: https://www.c82.net/naturalists-library/

a_c2• 7 days ago

Slightly off topic, anyone know of any good dinosaur illustration, ideally a large collection?

sreekanth67• 6 days ago

following. for my son

a_c2• 6 days ago

I’m also asking for my sons

zkmon• 7 days ago

Colors appear to be added by the restoration process. This kills originality of the works. I would prefer to see an artwork as it was created, not "enhanced" in anyway.

yorwba• 7 days ago

The original scans with faded colors and yellowed paper are also available: https://www.c82.net/naturalists-library/sources/scans

NetMageSCW2• 6 days ago

Incorrect.

gavmor• 6 days ago

The artwork "as it was created" is unavailable. The only options are Rougeoux or the ravages of time.

asd000hh• 7 days ago

wow beautiful!

digg99• 6 days ago

Colors may or may not be true to the original artist, but these are beautiful. Well done!

xtiansimon• 6 days ago

I guess the original author is Sir William Jardine, 7th Baronet (1800-1874)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_William_Jardine,_7th_Baron...

irenaeus• 6 days ago

My man (https://www.c82.net/images/naturalists-library/vol-4/plates/...) is having a bad day.

lioeters• 6 days ago

That's not a lion, it's the tortured soul of an artist.

stronglikedan2• 6 days ago

I don't see the problem. https://imgur.com/a/yGCdU9g

dennis_jeeves2• 4 days ago

Constipation after eating too much red meat?

Ylano2• 6 days ago

In some ways, publishing this provenance is as valuable as publishing the cleaned illustrations

NetMageSCW2• 6 days ago

I don’t need another large book to put on my bookshelf that I don’t have time to read, especially one at this price, but I want one.

OTOH, I have had a couple of book/apps on the iPad that were very nice, The Elements (still available) and one with items from MOMA (unfortunately removed from the App Store). That would be a cheaper way to distribute a book like experience.

Foobar8568• 6 days ago

In France, we have https://citadelles-mazenod.com/ and they publish large and gorgeous books... If only I had the Space to buy them. I bought a few when they were on sales, so two digits instead of 3 was good, but some limited and even larger are often > 500€. And not having the space to buy some of these kills me.

hovden• 6 days ago

Here is a large deluxe atlas of Fourier Transforms clothbound, stitched: https://fourieratlas.com/products/atlas-of-fourier-transform...

torgoguys• 6 days ago

I've always admired these sorts of illustrations. Botanical ones too. Please forgive the newb questions, but does this gorgeous illustration style have a name and how was it done (I.e., what is the medium -- some kind of colored ink?)

BaseBaal• 6 days ago

Natural science illustration returns reasonable results. I think most are done traditionally in some type of watercolors.

1970-01-01• 6 days ago

I hate to be a contrarian, but I've always hated them. IMHO, the extra-fancy-style illustrations are just that. Now that we have wildlife photography, these seem to regress and appear much worse (again, IMHO) because they are literally an illustration of reality and not a snapshot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwhVJ7cv9B4&t=36s

jfil• 5 days ago

"The plates were originally engraved in steel to ensure fine lines before being hand-colored on the small prints which measured only approximately 4 × 6 inches...

Once the black-and-white images were printed, they were passed to teams of colorists who applied watercolors by hand."

tiahura• 6 days ago

A while back these we’re getting stolen left and right from libraries.

chis2• 6 days ago

I admire the effort but it's hard to get excited about looking at some ancient illustrations which have been partly filled in by AI. I want to see the work of an actual specific artist, and be briefly transported to the times they lived in.

I have this old book of the Audobon bird illustrations and those are truly incredible. Back in the day there was a public audience for high quality, expensive art prints in books and they spared no expense.

mthoms• 6 days ago

The original scans are also available.

lowdest• 6 days ago

If you see the blog about the process linked in another comment, you see that AI was used to stitch 2-page images together that could not be flattened to be scanned together, and to remove the seam where the book binding pinched away part of the image.

Comparing the before and after, they appear to be quite accurate to the originals; almost all of the "restoration" appears to be in color correction for faded ink and paper.

chis2• 6 days ago

https://www.c82.net/blog/making-of-naturalists-library

You are correct! Apologies for not doing enough reading myself.

sparklingmango• 6 days ago

Beautiful. I'm going to use some of these to make a coloring book for my toddler.

xgulfie• 6 days ago

Wish there was a catalog of the actual, untouched originals instead of the sloppified ones

billfor• 6 days ago

This belongs with my other Taschen art books.

Can anyone that bought the book of plates comment on the quality of printing (binding, color and paper)? It seems like they use a printing on demand system instead of a publisher.

felineflock2• 6 days ago

Wow, why haven't LLMs been trained on the content of this site instead of Reddit and other less reliable/litigious sources?

stronglikedan2• 6 days ago

how do you know they haven't?

felineflock2• 5 days ago

The majority of the LLM training corpora comes from Common Crawl and social media - they're not a curated source like Open Culture.

RayBye• 6 days ago

I was quite disturbed by the fact that the monkey in the picture was chained up. I believe no living creature should be chained up.

1,300 Beautiful Wildlife Illustrations from the 19th Century Now Restored

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