Commissioned illuminated manuscript from ~1580s that depicts the history of the royal family members and their marriages and territorial disputes. VERY BEAUTIFUL full page colourful paintings on parchment.

A collection of about ten illustrated essays covering various aspects of Brown University's set of festival books which commemorate the great ceremonies, marriages, deaths, festivals and entrance into cities by the royalty and nobility from the Renaissance and Early Modern eras. The tradition of the festival book spans from 1475 to 1700.

19th century watercolour sketch album by unknown artists of myriad bird species. Nothing much is known about the work but the page designs are beautiful and the bird drawings themselves range from exquisite to slightly naive, as though it were a practice album.

Original alphabet designs from late 19th/early 20th c. US penmanship production company. Images are diverse alphabet types from medieval and traditional letterforms to more ornate purpose specific type designs. From U Scranton's Zaner-Bloser Penmanship collection.

1850s album of 100 prints by Utagawa (Ando) Hiroshige. The Ukiyo-e prints depict a wide variety of scenes, both semi-rural and urban, of Tokyo (or Edo as it was then known). This is a very popular series and is as amazing for the spectacular and diverse designs on display.

15th century incunabulum with lovely detailed woodcut images of devil-like figures intervening in human lives. It's meant to show the devil's doppelganger on earth, The Antichrist, who is said to battle Jesus on his return to earth at the time of the apocalypse.

1936 children's book of fables with illustrations by Benjamin Rabier. These are fun, both coloured and B&W children's anthropomophic animal sketches, accompanying 17th century French verses. The writing is by Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian.

Sketches + prints (in colour) from an ENORMOUS 17th century atlas that melds Joan Blaeu's 'Atlas Maior' with huge expansion by Dutch lawyer who employed artists to meet his desires for a geo-encylocpaedia. The 50 vol. series has maps and birds-eye views and portraits and naval battles and scenic drawings galore. The images in this post come from a truncated 8-vol. exquisite and expensive facsimile edition released by 2011 by Hes & de Graaf publishers in Holland.

At the Musuem of Printing in Lyons, a collection of some 1500+ examples of typeforms taken from all sorts of printed material ------ "Corpus typographical French identifies fonts designed in France between 1850 and today. He wants an illustration of French in this area. It is not intended to be exhaustive but representative: there alongside classics and creations more obscure characters work "serious" and "titraille" fanciful creations of the highest caliber, but also , weak characters, bad view, because the history of typography also has. has it All creations are the work of French type designers, or foreigners who worked for French foundries. has been achieved in the 2009 digitization plan led by the Ministry of Culture and Communication. Away stars poster, it presents a creation more discreet, this area is both extremely present, and for many of us "invisible" as graphic design. contemporary creation is present, although less than we like. A call for papers has been launched with type designers and graphic artists to create a kind of "deposit" of contemporary typographic design, including typography Corpus French is the mirror line. This call is still open: we invite everyone, typographers professionals, students, amateurs, to send us their creations printed form, whether specimens, brochures, posters or draw simple laser A4 ... They will not necessarily posted - or not immediately - but enter the museum's reserves to be carefully preserved. Bonne visit." (translation from: http://www.imprimerie.lyon.fr/imprimerie/sections/fr/documentation/corpus )

One of the earliest treatises dealing with descriptions and recommendations about different swimming strokes and how and what to do in water. The relatively unsophisticated copperplate engravings are equal parts amusing and perplexing, to be honest. The book by Melchisédec Thévenot was released in the 1690s and was based on an earlier Latin book with woodcuts by Everard Digby.

Album of hand-coloured marine species collected by French expeditionary voyage. L'Astrolabe, skippered by Dumont d'Urville, spent 3 years in 1820s sailing mostly in southern oceans looking for lost La Perouse expedition. Beautiful quality plates (including sectional anatomy views) resulted.

ABOUT:
"Ukiyo-e Search was created by John Resig, a computer programmer and avid enthusiast of Japanese woodblock prints.

In his personal research he saw a need for a tool that did not exist: some way of easily finding similar prints across multiple collections simultaneously. Additionally, some way of finding prints simply by uploading a picture of a print seemed like an especially critical tool for researchers and collectors alike.

A ton of work has gone into making this search engine as easy to use as possible, for example: Artist names have been unified into a single name across collections (even taking into account artist name changes) - even translating the Kanji names on Japanese museum sites. Also the best possible images have been found on the museum sites (which can often be a task unto itself).

This site is currently serving as a demonstration of what's possible but many improvements are still yet to be made."

currently allows search/browse of >200,000 images

Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Macauley Library:

"The Macaulay Library is the world's largest and oldest scientific archive of biodiversity audio and video recordings. Our mission is to collect and preserve recordings of each species' behavior and natural history, to facilitate the ability of others to collect and preserve such recordings, and to actively promote the use of these recordings for diverse purposes spanning scientific research, education, conservation, and the arts."

"The archive includes more than 175,000 audio recordings covering 75 percent of the world's bird species, with an ever increasing numbers of insect, fish, frog, and mammal recordings as well. The more recently established video archive includes over 50,000 clips, representing over 3,500 species."

Slim album of engravings with hugely outlandish chariot images purporting to record the triumphal entrance of a Russian Prince into the city of Venice. The bullock-drawn chariots feature some classical figures and embellished accoutrements as befitting the rococo-on-baroque cusp of ornament/design. eg. http://voices.yahoo.com/style-differences-between-baroque-rococo-art-15087.html?cat=2

Scenic etchings by James Fittler (print artist to the King) from ~1800 from all over Scotland. Essentially it's a half- historical travelogue and half antiquarian architectural record. Many castles are included as well as famous caves, rivers and urban centres. There are about 50 illustrations in this album (each accompanied by a few paragraphs of history/description.

Wide selection of prints (lithographs all) produced by various nations (mostly USA) that either encouraged people to contribute financially to the war efforts (bond buying or tickets for events) or worked as propaganda adverts to change attitudes and behaviours : make citizens support the troops and eat less or be more thrifty. All sorts of satirical or soap-operaesque or historical tropes deployed.

Wide selection of prints (lithographs all) produced by various nations (mostly USA) that either encouraged people to contribute financially to the war efforts (bond buying or tickets for events) or worked as propaganda adverts to change attitudes and behaviours : make citizens support the troops and eat less or be more thrifty. All sorts of satirical or soap-operaesque or historical tropes deployed.

Album of emblems and coats of arms from the Nice region in SE France. Hand-painted by a local librarian in 1903, this manuscript documents the noble family armorial insignias for the Nice & Savoy regions covering about 3 (?) centuries. Beautiful yet unsophisticated at the same time. Outside-in art.

CF Blunt's 1840s educational book on astronomy. It features >100 lithographs in colour showing solar system phenomena/events. Included are such things as orbital forces and paths, phases of the moon, the sun's role, map of lunar surface features, constellation locations and zodiac representations. Hand-coloured.

Early 20th century popular illustrations by Hamilton King : a commercially-orientated, high-volume style that became known as 'Hamilton King Girls'. Essentially it was a semi-romantic and 'pretty' depiction of the subjects engaging (in this set) in a wide range of sports, from golf to ping pong and from sailing to dance. These prints appeared on cigarette cards to promote loyalty and higher sales.

17th c. engravings of vases that were originally painted as part of a palace fresco design in Rome. The vases are detailed and ornate with grotesques and figures from classical mythology. The original paintings were very influential designs in the late Renaissance and early days of the distortions of Mannerism. It's actually this tension between Renaissance, Mannerism and tromp l'oeil painting and engraving effects that confer uniqueness on this series from a modern perspective, although at the time they were more along the lines of the means by which fantastical tropes of design were disseminated in the art world.

Fun colourful lithographs from 1920s by Benjamin Rabier (father of La Vache qui Rit). These are slightly anthropomorphised animals that were originally intended as teaching aides for kids who Rabier hoped to introduce to to the prolific Enlightenment science work of Buffon. But over time Rabier made them more humorous than educational so the animals have exaggerated pseudo-human facial expressions and the rendering is closer to absurd than realistic.

This is a relatively new and evolving AND substantial multi-collection from one of the great Universities of the world. Among other things (eg. Treasures) the CDL houses great zoomy screen architecture for visitors to see Newton's papers, Islamic & Sanskrit manuscripts, a couple of significant Jewish/Hebrew historical collections, Spanish chapbooks as well as christian/biblical manuscripts. A HUGELY important range of works.

Lithographs from about the 1870s from an influential 42-plate collection of educational illustrations. Husband and wife team of Arnold and Carolina Dodel-Port produced a colourful array of pictures to be used in educating students in botanical anatomy, many of the plates bearing multiple illustrations showing cross-sections and microscopic forms, with parts labelled or numbered to reference in the accompanying descriptive text.

"Berlin, 28 November 2012 – The Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (DDB) goes online for the general public today at www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de"

“The goal of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (DDB) is to offer everyone unrestricted access to Germany’s cultural and scientific heritage, that is, access to millions of books, archived items, images, sculptures, pieces of music and other sound documents, as well as films and scores, from all over Germany”

By way of example I searched with 'kupferstich' (engraving) & got >11000 illustrated results. This is a ***VERY SIGNIFICANT PORTAL*** with >1800 German institutions already taking part.

(it's in beta therefore ongoing)

Early-ish 20th cent. stencilling prints (aka pochoir) of ornament designs. These are stylised and polished-up folk art designs originating in Germany's Saxony region. It's a slender album mixing Art Nouveau and Art Deco tropes with specific regional art movement elements. The colourful illustration plates were designs for residential decor: fabric, ceramics and the like.

Hand-painted manuscript (Medieval/Renaissance style) made in German in 1580s. Depicts all manner of grenade and explosive device and cannon as well as some novelty extras like ninja throwing stars and jet packs on animals! Naive but handsome illustration style.

Some of the earliest watercolour sketches of animals, plants and local scenes in Australia. The English artist, John Lewin, arrived in Oz in 1800 and pursued an individual style that eschewed the staid and plastic classicism of European scientific drawing in favour of a more naturalistic approach that deployed the subjects among more true and real plants and atmosphere of their locality. So this collection is especially important in historical terms because it preserves some of the earliest tropes of a uniquely Australian identity (as obviously filtered by a European viewpoint).

Small, humorous series of engravings produced in Belgium in 1635 or thereabouts by Quirin Boel after designs by David Teniers. The prints show pairs of monkeys engaged in mundane, social activities as anthropomorphic parodies of humans in the same situation. Playing musical instruments, smoking a pipe, drinking, gambling etc. There's something of a deeper commentary, no doubt, regarding the apparent differences between the species and/or the brainpower needed for regular human pastimes and the like. The main point is that it's fun, ahead of any purported layers.

"This site provides an introduction to medieval manuscripts through the medium of the arcane art of paleography, or the history and decoding of the forms of handwriting. [..]

Manuscript miniatures featuring gold highlighting from late 15th c. France. Illustrations are of biblical scenes (mostly New Testament) together with elaborately decorated border regions containing painted foliage as well as imaginative drolleries among the acanthus leaves. Mirthful figures are caricatures of animals etc, seemingly at war, described at the source site as "grotesques, frequently obscene" (I think that's a stretch). Elegant, detailed, sophisticated hand.

18th/19th century watercolour and pencil sketches of designs for classical-influenced buildings and fountains in Spain. These are elegant cross-sectional drawings, often featuring figures from Greek and Roman mythology, inspired by the artist's travels through Europe as a young man. The sketches are better than preliminary and are of structures that exist (either modifying earlier buildings or de novo early iterations of new constructions). (a couple of ephemeral designs too: alphabetic letter with classical backdrop and beautiful arabesque after Raphael's Vatican pavilion)

Another selection of (mostly) 19th cent. title page images from atlases sourced from the David Rumsey website. These skew towards US printing houses both because Rumsey collects them and because NE USA was powerhouse of printing innovation in 2nd half of 19th cent. Many different forms of scenic, architectural, scientific and typographic embellishments make these prints arresting and memorable.

A sampling of about 20 images, most from the 2nd half of the 19th century, courtesy of David Rumsey Maps. The title pages range from detailed scenes of geographical locations mapped in the atlas to elaborate typographic lettering, cartographic and scientific tool vignettes, architectural engravings and occasional mythological figures.

The post features engravings/etchings of bird species from the Americas out of the Italian version of a 3-volume geographical encylopaedia of the region. The illustrations first appeared in that 1763 Italian version and it became the more widely known and cited work. The illustrations appear to be "fairly" accurate, although the birds are posed in contrived settings (still life) with slight smiles on their beaks perhaps. Some of the engraving work is very detailed and of high quality for mine (not so much the backgrounds, but those secondary/lazy elements are not detracting, at least). {images from Brown U}

"The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts provides an on-line catalogue for its collection of 18th- and 19th-century Japanese prints, which includes over 600 prints made by Japanese artists between the middle of the 18th century and the turn of the 19th century."

"This collection of Japanese art was one of the earliest and largest to make its way to Europe. Its core consisted of works collected by Sergei Nikolaevich Kitaev (1864-1927), the first major Russian collector of Japanese art. In 1916 S.N.Kitaev entrusted the collection to the Rumyantsev Museum for temporary storage. Later it was taken over by the Rumyantsev Museum and transferred as part of its prints and drawings collection to the Pushkin Museum. Further additions were made to the collection thanks to acquisitions from collectors, donations and gifts. The list of donors included scholars of art history (A.A.Sidorov, A.M.Efros), collectors (such as P.D.Ettinger) and the film director Sergei Eisenstein."

Print categories: pictures of the beauties, actor pictures, pictures of sumo wrestlers, landscape, pictures of flowers and birds, warrior pictures (and a few Japanese named themes)

Great high-res zoom architecture.

An early 17th century album of grotesque prints by Lucas Kilian. These are fairly cross genre, sharing elements of arabesque and rococo styling as well as traditional grotesque motifs. It's more along the lines of symmetrical vertical panels than the hodge-podge I'm perhaps suggesting. There are many, many abstracted ornamental designs coupled with allegorical and repurposed iconography.

Mid-15th c. illuminated manuscript from a Belgian scribe. In a part allegorical treatise, the work attempts to train people how to hunt birds and animals using weapons, nets, traps and dogs. There are also some scenes of royal lives in castles, as well as jousting and warring peasants. The miniatures are delicately painted.

"ManuscriptMiniatures.com was developed as a research source for medieval armour. Miniatures such as the ones presented here offer valuable insight into the form and function of armour, and complement other sources such as sculpture and extant pieces. The current state of digitized manuscripts online makes viewing numerous relevant miniatures across many manuscripts a difficult and time-consuming task. The search functionality on this website, as well as the direct access to miniatures, attempts to resolve this problem."

So, not only can you search by date range, country and tag (with variable number of images per page, the image page itself presents the a link to any relevant wiki article and a link to the source website.

Beautiful suite of engravings by Gabriel Huquier from the 1730s. These are elegant prints featuring a variety of birds in fairly natural poses and looks to be an album aimed at artists and ornamentalists. The pictures are both detailed and (seemingly) accurate and quite exquisite.

18th c. book by JF Anthing with 2-tone illustrations. There are dark central profile portrait silhouettes of the royalty and nobility of Europe, accompanied by elegant and diverse arrangements of border decoration.

"THE OTHER E H SHEPARD (1879-1976)
Though virtually synonymous with his images for Winnie-the-Pooh and The Wind in the Willows, Ernest Howard Shepard (1879-1976) was one of the most consistent and wide-ranging illustrators of the twentieth century.

This exhibition will show 200 published drawings and studies, representing his working life across six decades.
For much of his career, Shepard's draughtsmanship provided the backbone for Punch, Britain's most popular humorous weekly. As a regular staff cartoonist, Shepard produced gentle social satire, often involving children, and also some trenchant political comment, particularly during the Second World War.

The exhibition will also include Shepard's contributions to other magazines, notably a fascinating group of studies of the National Youth Orchestra, some of which appeared in The Illustrated London News in 1953."

(brilliant collection of pencil drawings by one of the greatest children's book artists of all time)

ALSO, previously on the blog: Original Winnie the Pooh Drawings: http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2008/11/original-winnie-pooh-drawings.html AND Wind in the Willows: http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2009/07/wind-in-willows.html

Early 17th century Baroque ornamental prints from Venice. These are complex etchings made up of abstracted acanthus foliage with a whole slew of satyrs, monsters, putti and emergent chimeric lifeforms. The prints were intended as models for other artists in paintings, tapestry, jewellery and prints.

Seminal publication on anatomy of the nervous system, released in the 1780s. Features beautiful hand-coloured etched stipple engravings of sections of brain tissue. (so it ends up looking something like a colourful early version of the modern day brain CT scan). Comes from a majory historical anatomy atlas work by Felix Vicq d'Azyr and seems to be the only copies of these illustrations on the web.

Late 19th century book of B&W lithographs from Henry Wilson, after earlier works by James Caulfield. The book features illustrations of unusual people - itinerants, dwarves, hairy women, contortionists, beggars and odd vagrants with outsized reputations for eccentric activities. Books on UK eccentrics became something of a genre (and in some ways still is); showing those you might have expected to meet in Victorian sideshow alleys in carnivals and circuses.

An online compendium of 383 public-domain essays by writers such as Francis Bacon, GK Chesterton, TS Eliot, Jerome K Jerome, Samuel Johnson & many more.

Watercolour sketches showing all sorts of workers/trades from (probably) the 19th century. It's from the classic Japanese book collection at the National Library and the semi-cartoonic depictions are quite detailed at times. All sorts of trades and crafts are seen from weaving machines to theatre actors and from farming scenes to 1-person mobile kitchens.

17th century treatise on optical perspective in art. Really it's an instruction manual for artists with geometric illustrations of spatial arrangements of targets for drawing in a distorted way. So it's heavy on anamorphosis and curve mirror effects. Author is Jean Francois Niceron. Note link in post to large collection of perspective books at Museo Galileo.

Watercolour sketch album featuring Mughal emperors and a few Hindu God(esse)s. Little is known about the history other than the work originates in India, some of the miniatures feature gold and silver highlights and a couple of others didn't get far beyond the pencil sketch stage.

Beautiful hand-coloured lithographic illustrations from the 1830s by John Gould. The plates of Trogon species of birds (vaguely like hummingbird in looks) are vibrant, naturalistic and multicoloured.

Daniel Rabel's imaginative, allegorical, grotesque watercolour sketches of ballet costumes for 3 different ballets performed by French monarch in the mid-1620s. Colourful, anthropomorphic, caricatures featuring everything from dragons to androgenous cross-dressers and from chimeric illusory animals to marching bands.

17th century engravings from an important work on China. Author: Olfert Dapper; Illustrator: Jacob van Meurs. The illustrations range from idols and religious buildings to processions, botany, animals and various fanciful absurdities with flying dragons and the like. The book was part of the new 'travel literature' genre but was also serious scholarship and Dapper's works served as models for academic writing. (some of the illustrations are obviously copied from Chinese books or artists)

Etchings highlighted with watercolour from 1870s by Adolphe Martial-Potémont. The illustrations show famous landmarks, buildings, arcades, streets, theatres, as well as horse and human traffic around central Paris. Elegant and understated, these prints essentially function as an urban & social record or snapshot of the era.

Stylised 2-tone lithographs of men performing work in their particular occupations. Illustration work by Chas Robinson (brother of W Heath Robinson) is quite humorous to the point of absurd. Images are accompanied by mediocre allegedly funny poetry, aimed at kids of course, about the subjects depicted. This is a rare book from 1900.

Itcho Hanabusa was an Edo artist who died in 1724. 50 years later, a trilogy of black ink, woodblock-illustrated books was published featuring designs by Hanabusa. They cover bizarre mythological characters and monsters to cultural street performance traditions that survive to modern times. The majority of the interesting scenes are fairly wacky though. In a good way!

What it says on the tin. This post has a selection of >20 title pages chosen for their range of interesting and elaborate typographic headings in the title pages. Some of the fonts are repeated (very little) but they all have unique page designs and individual decorative accompanying flourishes.

Anonymous set of watercolour sketches by a deft but not necessarily top-shelf early 17th c. artistic hand. Images depict nobility/royals either posing alone or on horseback, or at dinner etc, in all their fineries and in quite some detail. Charming is the operative word.

A site affiliated with art.com providing a broad database of 'reasonably' sized images from >1000 artists. Navigate by artist name, art movement, historical period and by popularity. This is essentially a reference site and the images/artists entries are combined with wikipedia information.

"The Folger Bindings Image Collection provides access to high resolution images and descriptions of bindings from the rare book and manuscript collections of the Folger Shakespeare Library."

Among the 3000+ images (of ~1000 bindings) are descriptions and depictions from the incunabula collection, 19th c. bindings by Roger Payne, books with fore-edge paintings and identified/unidentified bindings bearing armorial seals.

MORE INFO: http://www.folger.edu/Content/Collection/Folger-Bindings-Image-Collection/ AND HERE: http://www.folger.edu/template.cfm?cid=4148

Wide variety of artists, techniques and subject matter in this sampling of works chosen from an enormous set of art commissioned by NASA. The artworks essentially record the rise of the space flight industry during the 60s (especially) and 70s in conjunction with the long push towards the first lunar landing. Unique, varied & remarkable. (sourced from NASA's Eyewitness to Space Collection: http://airandspace.si.edu/collections/collection.cfm?collid=1764&startrow=1&showrecords=all)

19th cent. anonymous chromolithographs of all different kinds of animals. Mostly it is realistic and in natural settings except for monkeys who have been give absurd humanesque faces. The book was produced in France in about 1850-1875 and has muted colouring and was constructed on purpose to appear more like an engraving. These are most intriguing images because the type of paper on which they were printed has embedded stripes which is picked up on digisation.

1840s ink/watercolour sketches of characters out of the age-old, but British flavour of the Commedia dell'Arte tradition. This is a kind of comic strip with 2, 3 or 4 boxes per illustrations showing humorous scenes with pantaloon, harlequin, clown, columbine etc. It was produced in 1843 by pseudonymous brother illustrators.

Anonymous album of sketches in crude hand showing sword and dagger fights. It's a training manual of sorts, with a small number of illustrations devoted to knights in armour. The rest show sword or dagger and sometimes involve buckler defence as well as physical semi-wrestling techniques. In watercolour and ink.

Watercolour +/- gouache sketches from about the 1st decade of the 20th century. These are by a number of different artists depicting exaggerated caricatures or semi-caricatures of soldiers from British, Indian, Pakistani, Austrian & Hungarian armies. The vast majority are in colour and are portraits of single individuals.

This is a disparate and very large (>1000 items) collection of ink, pencil, watercolour & gouache drawings from the early days of the space program up to the mid-70s. These are artworks by a large number of artists (commissioned or at least sanctioned and encouraged by NASA) as much as they are snapshot records of the people, technology, locations and recognisable symbols of the times. In other words, it's more in the way of space art, really, than it is space documentation (it is *that* too); and it covers a vast array of subject matter.

Colourful, accurate and delicate lithographic illustrations from a serialised book released in the late 1870s. The plates are regarded as excellent both in terms of accuracy and for visual splendour. The book on the (mostly African) Sun-birds was by PB Shelley's nephew and the illustrations are by JG Keulemans, who went on to be a very well regarded ornithological illustrator.

Sampling from a very large set of watercolour sketches produced in East Asia sometime in the 19th century. The collection was acquired or commissioned by the Dutch consul to Canton and was given to Groningen University. These are beautiful, funny, absurd, anthropomorphic & colourful renderings of sometimes known and sometimes stylised imaginative marine species.

"The Cranach Digital Archive (cda) is an interdisciplinary collaborative research resource, providing access to art historical, technical and conservation information on paintings by Lucas Cranach (c.1472 - 1553) and his workshop. The repository presently provides information on more than 400 paintings including c.5000 images and documents from 19 partner institutions."

"Lucas Cranach the Elder embodies the ideals of Renaissance man active not only as a painter and printmaker, but also as an entrepreneur and politician."

This is a formidable & excellent website featuring high-res images.

Mid-17th century alphabet by JC Bierpfaff. No ordinary designs though - these Baroque letterforms are very organic, combining stylised botanical shapes with a sort of evolved grotesque style. In other words, these letters look like they're moving, filled with plants and monsters and reproducing on their own!

The OldMapsOnline Portal is an easy-to-use gateway to historical maps in libraries around the world, created by a collaboration between The Great Britain Historical GIS Project based at The University of Portsmouth, UK and Klokan Technologies GmbH, Switzerland.

Collections include the British Library, 'Vision of Britain', David Rumsey Map Collection, National Library of Scotland and the Moravian Library.

It uses a tweaked Googlemaps visual interface that instantly brings up relevant antique maps in the margin to match the location googlemaps location. There is also a blog: http://blog.oldmapsonline.org/

"Browse over 2,300 broadside ballads, mostly from 19th-century England, with subjects ranging from courtship, occupations and emigration to patriotism and wars."

"Ballads have been called the tabloid newspapers of their day: printed on single sheets and sold and sung on street corners, they offered ordinary people news and entertainment. This latest collection to be digitised covers topics from crime and disasters to fashion and sport"

====== Fair-sized basic image files, very easy to browse (it's set up by category), non-Flash zoom interface. ========

"Broadside ballads were popular songs, sold for a penny or half-penny in the streets of towns and villages around Britain between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries. These songs were performed in taverns, homes, or fairs -- wherever a group of people gathered to discuss the day's events or to tell tales of heroes and villains. As one of the cheapest forms of print available, the broadside ballads are also an important source material for the history of printing and literacy. Lavishly illustrated with woodcuts, they provide a visual treat for the reader and offer a source for the study of popular art in Britain." --> http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ballads/
#verycool

Sampling of late 19th / early 20th c. ex libris (bookplate) illustration database. All or almost all are engravings and many pertain to the Art Nouveau style Part 2 sampling from same collection was posted on 50Watts at the same time: http://50watts.com/The-Bookplate-Collection-Second-Half

Black & white ornament designs from a variety of countries/periods. These are mostly line drawing minimalist renders to demonstrate design shapes for use as models, copying or inspiration. And for occupying bored kids (or adults) on rainy days who like colouring-in.

Rakusan's Flower and Bird Print Series was a set of 100 multicoloured woodblock illustrations of birds in largely natural settings. These seem to be quite accurate sketches (as well as being quite exquisite). Via Rakusan.net : a developing homage site containing illustrations, notes and articles.

15th century French MS documenting 10 years of secular teaching by Guillaume Fichet on the art of speaking and rhetoric. Highly decorated full page miniatures on a few of the parchment pages together with ornate initials and beautiful handwriting - in a couple of styles - in Latin. Most decoration is stylised flora with occasional birds, drolleries and patterned designs.

Comical mid-1800s lithographs by Charles H Bennett. These humorous coloured sketches depict characters and their shadows with the shadows supposedly revealing the true nature of the picture's subject (so a little boy at the right angle is actually a greedy pig and so on). Bennett died young but was prolific and a talented contributor to the development of the comic genre.

Large set of late 19th | early 20th century commercial paper ephemera :: typography / letterforms / architectural illustrations / elaborate business logo designs. These are all from invoices and commerical letters and flyers and bills from the time when the printing was elaborate and special, more like extravagant map legends than company decal/identifiers.

A collection of (probably) late 19th and early-ish 20th century colourful wall charts depicting all different types of beetle and worm and bug in various stages of undress or dissection. They are scans or photographs of actual classroom charts in German or Dutch (mostly).

This is the announcement post about -- googleartproject.com -- that showcases in excess of 30,000 *very* high-res artistic items from a wide variety of world museums. Included are 'street-view' exhibits for >40 of the museums (and the White House). This is a v. significant happenstance.

Lithographs from an 1870s book by Charles Melville Scammon : he was a pioneer naturalist and a whaler at the same time. The images show a wide variety of whales (book concentrates on Pacific NW of USA) plus whaling tools and scenes of whaling. It is regarded as one of the most important books in the history of cetacean studies/history.

"NGA Images is a repository of digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art. On this website you can search, browse, share, and download images. A standards-based reproduction guide and a help section provide advice for both novices and experts. More than 20,000 open access digital images up to 3000 pixels each are available free of charge for download and use. NGA Images is designed to facilitate learning, enrichment, enjoyment, and exploration."

eg. "engraving" free-text search returns >11000 results

Press release: http://www.nga.gov/press/2012/nga_images.shtm