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1,300 Beautiful Wildlife Illustrations from the 19th Century Now Restored

openculture.com

11–20 of 54 posts

Re: 1,300 Beautiful Wildlife Illustrations from the 19th Century Now Restored

#11
I'm assuming it is quite nice, but terrible adverts popping up all over the place and distracting from the overall experience, so I only skimmed through it before I closed the window (on a work computer hence no adblock!)

Here's something similar from The Guardian, but without the ads:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/18/natural-...

Re: 1,300 Beautiful Wildlife Illustrations from the 19th Century Now Restored

#12
post #4

Can someone build a classifier that will tell is which of these images was drawn with a living, dead, or (charitably) dissected specimen?

I'm looking through https://www.c82.net/naturalists-library/illustrations and all the illustrations seems to be of non-dissected animals/insects, at the illustration themselves. Of course, impossible to know if the illustration was drawn from a dead or alive specimen, but none of them seems based on anything picked apart as far as I can tell.

As an example, all the drawn butterflies seems to be drawn as if they were alive, not dead (https://www.emilydamstra.com/please-enough-dead-butterflies/).

Re: 1,300 Beautiful Wildlife Illustrations from the 19th Century Now Restored

#13

Remember when it was totally controversial that Ted Turner intended to colorize classic films such as Casablanca , and how technology was going to ruin artistry in this way? Good times.

I don't like most of the colourisations of old films. I try and seek out the black and white versions when I can. B&W is a different medium from colour.

Re: 1,300 Beautiful Wildlife Illustrations from the 19th Century Now Restored

#14

I'm assuming it is quite nice, but terrible adverts popping up all over the place and distracting from the overall experience, so I only skimmed through it before I closed the window (on a work computer hence no adblock!) Here's something similar from The Guardian, but without the ads: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/18/natural-...

If you’re on iOS, get Wipr adblocker. The page was very clean för me. No ads.

Re: 1,300 Beautiful Wildlife Illustrations from the 19th Century Now Restored

#17
post #7
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not only did AI tools then help him unearth need­ed sources and fill in visu­al gaps I think that's clear

I took that to mean filling in the gaps on the source data, not literally filling in pen and ink gaps in the drawing. If so, that's a shame. It pollutes the original and isn't what counts as restoration.

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