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.

European Butterflies Plate 10

Arctia caja caterpillar

Argynnis paphia

Catocala elocata

Danaus chrysippus

Deilephila Nerii

European Ocneria dispar female

Harpyia vinula caterpillar

Parnassius apollo

Adscita statices