1,300 Beautiful Wildlife Illustrations from the 19th Century Now Restored
233 points by gslin 18 hours ago | 45 comments

ilt 12 hours ago
Direct link to the library instead of the blog: https://www.c82.net/naturalists-library/
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chis 5 hours 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.

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lowdest 4 hours 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.

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chis 3 hours ago
https://www.c82.net/blog/making-of-naturalists-library

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

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mthoms 5 hours ago
The original scans are also available.
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felineflock 3 hours ago
Wow, why haven't LLMs been trained on the content of this site instead of Reddit and other less reliable/litigious sources?
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stronglikedan 2 hours ago
how do you know they haven't?
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NetMageSCW 9 hours 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.

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Foobar8568 9 hours 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.
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billfor 4 hours 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.

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torgoguys 8 hours 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?)
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BaseBaal 5 hours ago
Natural science illustration returns reasonable results. I think most are done traditionally in some type of watercolors.
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1970-01-01 5 hours 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
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irenaeus 9 hours ago
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stronglikedan 2 hours ago
I don't see the problem. https://imgur.com/a/yGCdU9g
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lioeters 7 hours ago
That's not a lion, it's the tortured soul of an artist.
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xtiansimon 10 hours ago
I guess the original author is Sir William Jardine, 7th Baronet (1800-1874)

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

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zkmon 11 hours 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.
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yorwba 11 hours ago
The original scans with faded colors and yellowed paper are also available: https://www.c82.net/naturalists-library/sources/scans
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gavmor 7 hours ago
The artwork "as it was created" is unavailable. The only options are Rougeoux or the ravages of time.
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NetMageSCW 9 hours ago
Incorrect.
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sparklingmango 5 hours ago
Beautiful. I'm going to use some of these to make a coloring book for my toddler.
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a_c 12 hours ago
Slightly off topic, anyone know of any good dinosaur illustration, ideally a large collection?
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sreekanth67 3 hours ago
following. for my son
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a_c 3 hours ago
I’m also asking for my sons
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noduerme 15 hours ago
Unclear from the text: Was AI used in modifying or filling any images in the restoration process?
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Cthulhu_ 14 hours 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.
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ZeroGravitas 10 hours 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.

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Ylano 8 hours ago
AI was used to "fill in visual gaps"
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smallnix 15 hours ago
> Not only did AI tools then help him unearth need­ed sources and fill in visu­al gaps

I think that's clear

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noduerme 15 hours 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.
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braedon-dev 12 hours ago
[flagged]
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Ylano 9 hours ago
In some ways, publishing this provenance is as valuable as publishing the cleaned illustrations
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digikazi 14 hours 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-...

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dspillett 6 hours 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”.

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Flow 12 hours ago
If you’re on iOS, get Wipr adblocker. The page was very clean för me. No ads.
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yaur 15 hours ago
Can someone build a classifier that will tell is which of these images was drawn with a living, dead, or (charitably) dissected specimen?
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embedding-shape 13 hours 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/).

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xgulfie 4 hours ago
Wish there was a catalog of the actual, untouched originals instead of the sloppified ones
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digg99 10 hours ago
Colors may or may not be true to the original artist, but these are beautiful. Well done!
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Animats 16 hours ago
Soon to be ingested for AI training.
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tiahura 8 hours ago
A while back these we’re getting stolen left and right from libraries.
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asd000hh 11 hours ago
wow beautiful!
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ButlerianJihad 15 hours 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.
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nephihaha 13 hours 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.
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zuluworks 14 hours ago
[dead]
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aaron695 12 hours ago
[dead]
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