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Today marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Richard Wagner, one of the most influential and controversial composers ever to have lived. With his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”) – by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts – he revolutionised opera and gave birth...
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Selected images from a massive late 19th century tome entitled simply Magic, subtitled Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, including Trick Photography, compiled and edited by Albert A. Hopkins. The book takes a thorough tour through the popular magic tricks and illusions of the day, including along the way many delightfully surreal diagrams and illustrations,...
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Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839–1892) is widely recognized as the last great master of Ukiyo-e, a type of Japanese woodblock printing (literally meaning “pictures of the floating world”). He is additionally regarded as one of the form’s greatest innovators. His career spanned two eras – the last years of Edo period Japan, and the first years...
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These two images are from the book On the Writing of the Insane (1870) by G. Mackenzie Bacon, medical superintendant at an asylum (now Fulbourn Hospital) located near Cambridge, England. The pictures are the product of a “respectable artisan of considerable intelligence was sent to the Cambridgeshire Asylum after being nearly three years...
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A small selection of hearts through the history of art. (Images from a variety of places, see link below each image to see the source). and to finish off, a map of love, a land called Tendre: HELP TO KEEP US AFLOAT The Public Domain Review is a not-for-profit project and we rely on...
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A series of elaborate “skeleton leaf” arrangements, from the photographic studios of John P. Soule which stood on Washington Street in Boston from 1861 to 1882. As well as producing many pictures of Boston’s buildings, notable events (such as the 1869 National Peace Jubilee and the great fire of 1872), carte-de-visite portraits etc., Soule...
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A Japanese woodcut by Kamekichi Tsunajima titled “Ryūkō eigo zukushi”, or “A Fashionable Melange of English Words”. The print shows images of animals, activities and objects each with their Japanese and English names. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) some spelling mistakes have given rise to some interesting new activities such as “Refreshiug” and “Cuting Rice”,...
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A selection of images from the Library of Congress found via the always excellent Ptak Science Books blog. The daguerreotype, invented by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in 1837, was the first commercially successful photographic process and was popular throughout the mid-19th century. Daguerreotype portraits were made by the model posing (often with head fixed in place...
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“Beautiful and appropriate” engravings for Oliver Golsmith’s History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1825). Oliver Goldsmith was (1730-1774) was an Anglo-Irish novelist, playwright and poet, who is best known for his novel The Vicar of Wakefield, his pastoral poem The Deserted Village, and his plays The Good-Natur’d Man and She Stoops to Conquer....
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Contrary to what many believe, Santa Claus as we know him today – sleigh riding, gift-giving, rotund and white bearded with his distinctive red suit trimmed with white fur – was not the creation of the Coca Cola Company. Although their Christmas advertising campaigns of the 1930s and 40s were key to popularising the...
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The illustrative plates from Snowflakes: a Chapter from the Book of Nature (1863), a collection of poems, extracts, anecdotes and reflections on the theme of snow and the snowflake. According to the preface of the book, apart from the first few geometrical figures at the top of the first plate, which show the primary...
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A selection from the 100 plates featured in the book Examples of Chinese ornament selected from objects in the South Kensington museum and other collections (1867) by Owen Jones. From the Preface: The late war in China, and the Ti-ping rebellion, by the destruction and sacking of many public buildings, has caused the introduction...
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“The Temple of Flora” is the third and final part of Robert John Thornton’s New illustration of the sexual system of Carolus von Linnaeus, considered by many to be the greatest of all flower books. It consists of a series of sumptuous depictions of flowers notable for their epic and unusual settings. Interwoven amongst...
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José Guadalupe Posada (1851–1913) was a Mexican illustrator known for his satirical and politically acute calaveras. Deriving from the Spanish word for ‘skulls’, these calaveras were illustrations featuring skeletons which would, after Posada’s death, become closely associated with the mexican holiday Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. Most of these calaveras...
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Selection of studio posed photographs from the New York Public Library’s Spalding Collection, a series of over 500 photographs, prints, drawings, caricatures, and printed illustrations donated in 1921 by early baseball player and sporting-goods tycoon A. G. Spalding (whose name to this day is printed across every ball used in the National League). The...
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Images from Deutsche Volkstrachten, Original-Zeichnungen mit erklärendem Text (1887) by Albert Kretschmer, a book detailing the folk dress of the peoples in areas covering modern day Austria and southern Germany. Albert Kretschmer (1825-1891) was known for his highly detailed drawings, watercolors and lithographs usually in publications detailing varieties of German and international costumes and...
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A selection of the more well known of the leading 19th century figures featured in Cartoon Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Men of the Day (1873) with drawings by Frederick Watty and accompanied by biographical pieces on each of the subjects. With the exception of one, it is a compilation of all the cartoon...
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These beautiful watercolours come from the Austrian painter Aloys Zötl’s Bestiarium, a series of exquisite paintings of various animals undertaken from 1831 through until his death in 1887. He was relatively unknown until, decades after his death, his work was “re-discovered” by surrealist André Breton who was taken by the surrealist aesthetic he saw...
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Images by the great Parisian cartoonist J.J Grandville from his Les Fleurs Animées – his last work, originally published posthumously in 1847, the year of his death. With its mix of the satirical and poetic, the book is considered to be one of his most supreme achievements. (All images taken from Volumes 1 and...
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These rhyming advertisements were created by “commercial rhymist” W.N.Bryant for a variety of drugstores in the states of Texas, Louisiana, and Indian Territory. They contain some ingenious sections of poetic flair, and strangely all end on a cigar-related note. Not sure if too many people would quite have the patience these days to stay...
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A selection of the more inventive entries to a competition to design a new tower for London. The year previous, 1889, saw the hugely successful Eiffel Tower go up in the centre of Paris, and the good people of London, not to be outdone, decided to get one of their own. A wonderful array...
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Plates 294 to 299 of Eadweard Muybridge’s groundbreaking collection from 1887 titled Animal Locomotion: an Electro-Photographic Investigation of Connective Phases of Animal Movements, a massive portfolio with 781 plates comprising of 20,000 photographs. In the preceding four years Muybridge made more than 100,000 images, working obsessively in Philadelphia under the auspices of the University...
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The etching above shows William Crabtree in 1639 making what is thought to be one of the very first observations of the ‘Transit of Venus’, when the planet Venus crosses the face of the Sun. There would be three more such occurrences before the event of 1882 shown in the images below. Rather than...
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Images from Anatome Testudinis Europaeae (1819-21) by the German physician and naturalist Ludwig Heinrich Bojanus (1776–1827). Bojanus was born at Bouxwiller in Alsace and studied at Darmstadt and the University of Jena. In 1806 he became professor of veterinary medicine at the University of Vilnius, switiching to comparative anatomy in 1824. As well as...
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Illustrations showing movement of air through various rooms, from Lectures on Ventilation (1869) by Lewis W. Leeds. Images via Wikimedia Commons. The full book can be seen here on Internet Archive. HELP TO KEEP US AFLOAT The Public Domain Review is a not-for-profit project and we rely on support from our readers to stay...
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Diagrams from Geometrical psychology, or, The science of representation: an abstract of the theories and diagrams of B. W. Betts (1887) by Louisa S. Cook, which details New Zealander Benjamin Bett’s remarkable attempts to mathematically model the evolution of human consciousness through geometric forms. From the Introduction: The symbolic forms which Mr. Betts has...
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Félix Nadar was the pseudonym of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (1 April 1820, Paris – 23 March 1910), a French photographer, caricaturist, journalist, novelist and balloonist. He took his first photographs in 1853 and pioneered the use of artificial lighting in photography, working in the catacombs of Paris. Around 1863, Nadar built a huge (6000 m³)...
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The Brighton and Rottingdean Seashore Electric Railway was a unique coastline railway in Brighton, England that ran through the shallow waters of the English Channel between 1896 and 1901. Magnus Volk, its owner, designer and engineer, had already been successful with the more conventional Volk’s Electric Railway, which had then not been extended east...
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Popular photography can properly be said to have started 120 years ago with the introduction of the Kodak camera, the invention of an American, George Eastman (1854-1932). It was a simple, leather-covered wooden box – small and light enough to be held in the hands. Taking a photograph with the Kodak was very easy,...
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In March 2011, Geographicus Rare Antique Maps, a specialist dealer in fine and rare antiquarian cartography and historic maps, donated their collection of over 2000 digital images to Wikimedia Commons. Here is just a small selection of a really great collection. Explore more, and help Wikimedia to categorise them, here. Each map shown below...
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Plates from Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne’s ‘Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine’, published by Jules Renouard, Paris, in 1862. By applying electrodes to male and female volunteers, Duchenne was able to activate individual muscles in the face. He saw the human face as a map, the features of which could be codified into universal taxonomies of inner...
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Selection of images from “Landscape and marine views of Norway” (ca.1890-1900), a set in the Library of Congress’ Photochrom Prints Collection (via Flickr Commons). Photochrom prints are colorized images produced from black-and-white photographic negatives via the direct photographic transfer of a negative onto lithographic limestone printing plates, with each colour tint applied using a...
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The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are described by John of Patmos in his Book of Revelations, the last book of the New Testament. The chapter tells of a “‘book’, or ‘scroll’, in God’s right hand that is sealed with seven seals”. The Lamb of God, or Lion of Judah, (Jesus Christ) opens the...
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