In one lithograph, a trio of African elephants stands by a river. Wolf illustrated two volumes of rare animals depicted in their natural environment rather than the London zoo where they actually lived. Joseph Wolf's African Elephants reflects a Victorian family structure rather than actual wild elephant behavior. Other works, like the zoological sketches of Joseph Wolf, show how societal norms have shaped the ways people imagine animals. Per Hyperallergic, selections range from animal sketches to historical diagrams and botanical studies.Ĭollected illustrations and digitized pages of preserved plants, called herbaria, provide insights for researchers studying the ways plants have adjusted to a changing climate. Then 300 titles strong, the database has since grown to more than 200,000 volumes, 150,000 illustrations and information on some 150 million species. “It can show extra details of the fruit, for example, and what it looks like bisected.”įounded in 2006 by a consortium of natural history libraries, among them the Smithsonian Libraries, the BHL launched its online portal the following year. “An illustration can show various parts of a plant at the same time, something a photo really can’t,” Robin Jess, director of the New York Botanical Garden’s Botanical Art and Illustration program, told the Associated Press’ Katherine Roth in 2019. Even today, an illustration can offer more clarity than a photograph.Ĭourtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library

The practice of creating detailed illustrations of flora and fauna, whether to document an expedition or a medical practice, gained popularity well before photography was up to the task. The BHL’s earliest texts date to the mid-1400s its digital collection includes illustrations as recently created as the early 1900s.

Now, reports Hakim Bishara for Hyperallergic, more than 150,000 such artworks are freely available for download via the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), an open-access digital archive that preserves images and documents related to botany, wildlife and biodiversity.Ĭaptured in watercolor paintings, lithograph prints and black-ink linework, the collected illustrations demonstrate the diversity of Earth’s wildlife as observed over hundreds of years. Botanical illustrations offer mesmerizingly detailed and vividly colored glimpses of the natural world.

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