Here is a fun collection of small drawings by Paul Mercuri from an early to mid 19th century book, Costumes Historiques (Paris, 1850's or 6o's).  I received the scans from a colleague and they were quite dirty, so I have done a lot of touch-up.   Unfortunately, the resolution is not as high as I would like, but they are more than adequate for most online uses, clipart, illustrating reports and the like. As always, these public domain jpg images are free of charge and may be used for any purpose.  Although I have put a lot of effort into cleaning spots and smudges, as well as enhancing the colors, they are still in the public domain and have no usage restrictions.  Donations for my efforts and for the costs of running this site are always appreciated, but are by no means expected or necessary. All 130 or so items may be browsed and downloaded in the gallery.   Images may be downloaded one at a time in at least 3 different sized, or you may download a large number at once via ZIP file by using the shopping cart feature in the gallery.  It is called a shopping cart, but there is no ...

I acquired some very nice high resolution scans of an old butterfly book, "Europe's Best-Known Butterflies" (F. Nemos, Berlin, 1895).  The images were available at Wikimedia Commons, but needed a lot of cleaning up for me to post them here.  I separated the individual butterflies and caterpillars from the larger plates, and did some color enhancement and editing of smudges. The result is close to 200 images in the Gallery here at Old Book Art.   The original 18 full plates (cleaned up) are in their own folder here. The individual butterfly and caterpillar images range from quite small (less than 500 pixels) to very large (3000 pixels or so.)  Some of these look like moths, but I cannot always tell a butterfly from a moth that easily.  The full plates are each about 3850 by 5450 pixels.  As always, these pictures are free and available for no charge here at Old Book Art.  Donations are appreciated but by no means required as these are public domain images that I have simply cleaned up and collected. Here are a few samples.  If you want to browse them all go to the GALLERY. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="141" caption="European Butterflies Plate 10"][/caption] [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="200" caption="Arctia caja ...