1,300 Beautiful Wildlife Illustrations from the 19th Century Now Restored
openculture.com232 points by gslin 17 hours ago
232 points by gslin 17 hours ago
Direct link to the library instead of the blog: https://www.c82.net/naturalists-library/
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.
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.
https://www.c82.net/blog/making-of-naturalists-library
You are correct! Apologies for not doing enough reading myself.
Source posted some days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48850978 and blog https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48850987
Wow, why haven't LLMs been trained on the content of this site instead of Reddit and other less reliable/litigious sources?
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.
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.
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.
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?)
Natural science illustration returns reasonable results. I think most are done traditionally in some type of watercolors.
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
My man (https://www.c82.net/images/naturalists-library/vol-4/plates/...) is having a bad day.
I guess the original author is Sir William Jardine, 7th Baronet (1800-1874)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_William_Jardine,_7th_Baron...
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.
The original scans with faded colors and yellowed paper are also available: https://www.c82.net/naturalists-library/sources/scans
The artwork "as it was created" is unavailable. The only options are Rougeoux or the ravages of time.
Beautiful. I'm going to use some of these to make a coloring book for my toddler.
Slightly off topic, anyone know of any good dinosaur illustration, ideally a large collection?
Unclear from the text: Was AI used in modifying or filling any images in the restoration process?
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.
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.
> Not only did AI tools then help him unearth needed sources and fill in visual gaps
I think that's clear
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.
In some ways, publishing this provenance is as valuable as publishing the cleaned illustrations
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-...
> 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”.
Can someone build a classifier that will tell is which of these images was drawn with a living, dead, or (charitably) dissected specimen?
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/).
Wish there was a catalog of the actual, untouched originals instead of the sloppified ones
Colors may or may not be true to the original artist, but these are beautiful. Well done!
Soon to be ingested for AI training.
A while back these we’re getting stolen left and right from libraries.
wow beautiful!
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.
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.
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