Richard Wilkinson's illustrations - modern, melancholy pictures with a subdued palette but vivid identity.
posted on Aug 18, 2008 - View this thread

Packed full of galleries of beautiful illustrations by Maxfield Parrish, Aubrey Beardsley, William Morris, Gustave Doré, Arthur Rackham and others with prints one can buy of any illustration, Artsy Craftsy includes a sumptuous collection of Victorian Fairies illustrations. The site also has the illustrated Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, illustrations of cats in fairy tales, Magic Cats, and a selection of beautiful free ecards as well.
posted on Dec 19, 2007 - View this thread

In 1627, Schiller's Coelum Stellatum Christianum attempted to replace the mythical constellation figures with Christian figures. More from the Linda Hall Library Digital Services Unit. Art, illustration, and astronomy aficionados will appreciate the beauty of historic celestial atlas illustrations: Bayer's Uranometria 1603 (also the 1661 Edition), Flamsteed - Fortin Atlas Celeste - 1776 (text intro), Celestial Atlas by Alexander Jamieson. HubbleSource is cleaning up scans from one historic atlas and making them available in web and hi-res versions for use in non-commercial applications. (See also: David Rumsey Map Collection, and the exhibition Out of this World (index & T.O.C.), more Images, Artwork and Historical Objects at the US Naval Observatory.
posted on Dec 13, 2007 - View this thread

From about 1875 to the 1940s, cigarette cards spurred tobacco sales. Sets offer a glimpse into the popculture of the times, spanning newsmakers, cinema celebrities, and sports stars; cute illustrated subjects, like "frisky" and children with rosy cheeks; handy info like air raid precautions, first aid, and amusing tricks; and neat stuff like famous escapes, exotic races, and figures of speech. Browse more fun sets of vintage images.
posted on Dec 11, 2007 - View this thread

Microorganisms as eye candy: A gallery of illustrations from the marvelous Artforms in Nature, Kunstformen der Natur 1899-1904 by Ernst Haeckel, an eminent, prolific and very controversial German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist, who named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms and coined many terms in biology, including phylum, phylogeny and ecology.
posted on Nov 8, 2007 - View this thread

Louis Wain became one of the most famous British illustrators of the late Victorian and Edwardian era after trying to cheer up his wife Emily by drawing portraits of their pet cat, Peter. In addition to publishing a popular children's book about kittens, he was a founder of the U.K's National Cat Club who was instrumental in promoting the Cat Fancy movement, which encouraged Britons of all classes to view cats as lovable pets instead of household pests. Unfortunately, after Wain's wife Emily died of breast cancer, Wain gradually went mad due to psychosis and late onset schizophrenia, ending up in London's notorious Bethlehem Hospital (the etymological origin for the word bedlam). While at Bedlam, Wain continued to draw, but his cat portraits transformed into pure geometric abstraction and psychedelic fractals, but some see harbingers of madness in cryptically titled works, such as Early Indian Irish and The Fire of the Mind Agitates the Atmosphere. For more insight on Wain, check out this 1896 interview and this short film dramatizing the progression of Wain's schizophrenia through his art.
posted on Aug 12, 2007 - View this thread

Born in Bohemia, Wenceslas (Vaclav) Hollar (wikipedia; illustrated chronology of his life; essay on Hollar) was one of the leading etchers and illustrators of the middle 17th Century, working primarily in England and Belgium. The University of Toronto has placed almost his entire works online, including more than 4,000 images and some complete illustrated books. Some favorites: the man himself; simple, powerful Illustrations of Genesis; The Pack of Knaves; Elephants and Flowers; Shells; Fitting out a Hull; and Muffs (sfw). Most images are zoomable, and you can create marked lists and compare images side by side.
posted on Jun 17, 2007 - View this thread

Fritz Kahn was a German writer & illustrator in the 1920s who specialized in illustrating the physical processes of human bodies as though they were machine powered. Perhaps it's easier to show than describe.
posted on Jun 13, 2007 - View this thread

Frenzied Fauna -- Michel Gange's illustrated animal kingdom. (via)
posted on May 8, 2007 - View this thread

An illustrated edition of the Ise Monogatari (Wikipedia, review of translation). Yeah, yeah, it's in Japanese, but just keep hitting the forward button (the leftmost of the two on the right, red/brown rather than blue/green) and you'll find lots of pretty pictures. I can't improve on the descriptions by Matt of No-sword, where I found it, so I'll just quote him: "Behold our hero maxin' and relaxin' at his writing-desk, looking like he just got hired as a middle manager at his dad's lighter-flint concern! Thrill to the famous scene where he is visited by the Pineapple of Golden Week Past! Laugh as he is mistaken for a member of Aerosmith! Wonder why everyone is just sitting around smiling contentedly when the building is obviously on fire!"
posted on Feb 27, 2007 - View this thread

The children's book illustrators archive. Czeschka - Die Nibelungen; Nielsen - Hansel and Gretel; Goble - Japanese Fairy Tales; Dulac - Arabian Nights; Pavlishin - Folktales of the Amur; Finlay - The Ship of Ishtar; Detmold - The Arabian Nights; Crane - Flora Feast; Kirin - Croatian Tales of Long Ago; Clarke - Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination; Collard - British Fairy Tales, and; more Rackham in the gallery then you can shake a pen at.
posted on Dec 13, 2006 - View this thread

Medical Illustrations.
posted on Aug 12, 2006 - View this thread

Arthur Rackham Illustrations.
posted on Aug 8, 2006 - View this thread

Son of Rambo (not to be confused with Rambo IV: Holy War/End of Peace) is a Hammer and Tongs film about two kids in the 80s making a home video sequel to First Blood. No teaser or trailer available as of post time, but there is a showcase of illustrations by hand-picked and contributing artists that claim to cover the era, themes and content of the film.
posted on Jun 20, 2006 - View this thread

The Memory of The Netherlands is an extensive digital collection of illustrations, photographs, texts, film and audio fragments from a large variety of Dutch cultural institutions. There are about 50 collections (in english).
posted on Feb 19, 2006 - View this thread

Electronic Biologia Centrali-Americana is a collaboration between the Smithsonian, Missouri Botanical and Kew Gardens, the British Natural History Museum and various other institutions which has enabled the digitizing of 58 volumes of natural history about central America produced between 1880 and 1920. It includes descriptions of more than 50,000 species with images of more than 18,000 birds, more birds, snakes, turtles, centipedes, spiders, more spiders, plants, mollusks, more plants, butterflies, orthoptera insects, more butterflies and their family's (moth-like) families, mammals and even some historic maps of the region. There is a parallel project attempting to provide access to much more scientific data and specimens between these institutions. Note: 'next' button at top +/- bottom of these large thumb pages; large high resolution jpegs work (in most cases) but zoom and .pdfiles are not yet enabled. I've only just scratched the surface.
posted on Sep 26, 2005 - View this thread

"A natural history of birds. Most of which have not been figur'd or describ'd, and others very little known from obscure or too brief descriptions without figures, or from figures very ill design'd." [1743] and "Birds of North America" [1903] Samples (the last 15 from each link): [1743]: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. [1903]: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. [MI]
posted on Sep 10, 2005 - View this thread

The Fantastic in Art and Fiction. The Cornell Institute for Digital Collections presents an online image-bank that "provides a visual resource for the study of the Fantastic or of the supernatural in fiction and in art" from the danse macabre to medical oddities to creatures straight out of Hell (and Heaven). The university's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections has put together a captivating little collection of the marvelous, the mysterious and the magical. You can search through all the images at once or search by book title. (Some images may be slightly NSFW.)
posted on Jul 29, 2005 - View this thread

Traditional Russian fairytales with beautiful illustrations depicting scenes from the stories.
posted on Feb 23, 2005 - View this thread

Jeffrey Rowland, creator of Wigu, author of I Was a Teenage Billionaire Psychopath, and owner of a brilliant illustrated blog, has unveiled his newest project - the TV Network Channel.
posted on Jan 17, 2005 - View this thread

4,563 cartoons by Welsh cartoonist Leslie Illingworth

"The Illingworth cartoon collection at the National Library, which contains 4,563 images, explores a wide variety of topics through the eyes of one of Britain's best known cartoonists of the twentieth century."
posted on Nov 22, 2004 - View this thread

Thackeray's 'Chronicle of the Drum' , illustrated.
posted on Nov 16, 2004 - View this thread

Destructed.Info - A PDF magazine with some excellent illustrations. Three issues on the site so far.
posted on Oct 15, 2004 - View this thread

"I follow a dog chasing some invisible bird." Four Stories: Some of the most breathtaking woodcuts I've seen a good while illustrating four sparse but moving stories. After a decade of metafiction and Raygun typography, this letterpressed book of mythic narrative is refreshing, and inspiring.
posted on Sep 11, 2004 - View this thread

Smithsonian Catalog of Botanical Illustrations Feel the need for a touch of spring? The Smithsonian offers five hundred images (created by eleven artists) from its vast collection of botanical illustrations. Check out the images in the Curtis Botanical Magazine (1787-1807). For more wide-ranging overviews, try the Scientific Illustrators (1600-present); the Missouri Botanical Garden Library (digitized copies of 46 rare books); this special exhibition at the University of Delaware (general survey); and Haley & Steele (women artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). Julene Sodt provides an extensive bibliography.
posted on Mar 8, 2004 - View this thread

A Flash-heavy "Illustrated Complete Summary of Gravity's Rainbow". Includes an Episode Guide and a gallery of related art. See also the Wikipedia entry if you want some background, including a link to an online concordance.
posted on Dec 14, 2003 - View this thread

Seth Scriver's Animations (Flash Required)
posted on Dec 5, 2003 - View this thread

Exotic Entomology. 'Provided for your delight are a small number of the world's butterflies and moths, taken from Dru Drury's three-volume monograph entitled Illustrations of Exotic Entomology.'
Related :- Schreber's Fabulous Beasts. 'In 1774 Johann Christian Dan Schreber authored a multivolume set of books entitled Die Saugthiere in Abbildungen nach der Natur mit Beschreibungen. Focusing on mammals of the world, these books were lavishly illustrated with 755 hand-colored plates ... '
posted on Jul 5, 2003 - View this thread

Illuminated manuscripts are truly a joy to behold. And there are a remarkable number of them available on the web for your viewing pleasure. The most famous illuminated MS is the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. For galleries with multiple images, try the resources at DScriptorium, Web Gallery of Art, and the Leaves of Gold exhibition. Elyse Boucher's page is a work-in-progress detailing the history and methods of illuminating books, with both images and secondary sources; see also Sue Wood's Art and Books page.
posted on Apr 30, 2003 - View this thread

Palmer Cox created the famous Brownie characters in 1883, and a successful series of children's books detailing their adventures. These are the characters that George Eastman chose for promoting the Brownie line of Kodak cameras.
posted on Apr 29, 2003 - View this thread

"This vellum-bound curiosity is one of the rarest and most mysterious etching suites of the late Renaissance." Braccelli's fantastic drawings are excellent examples of early (early, early) surrealism. For higher quality images, try this link instead.
posted on Mar 17, 2003 - View this thread

Aiee!!    Pelorosaurus by god knows who, Corythosaurus illustrated by Zdenek Burian, Ornitholestes by Charles Knight--Dinosaur Illustrations has led me to two wonderful sites: Early Image and Paper Dinosaurs, 1824-1969 - An Exhibition of Original Publications From the Collections of the Linda Hall Library, as well as many other little treasures.
posted on Nov 22, 2002 - View this thread

Zoological Bloopers and Practical Jokes. Strange Science is a great little page of missteps in the classification and illustration of exotic and extinct animals. It's hard to classify all the links; some are dinosaur screwups, some are just poor depictions of animals from the time before photographs. Most are fascinating. Although, they skip over one of my favorite examples, Michelangelo's Jonah and the Whale.
posted on Nov 7, 2002 - View this thread

For All Your Art Needs: My search for a more contemporary and inclusive supplement to Artcyclopedia has ended. Artnet is it. It's an amazing resource and its list of artists, is the longest and most generously illustrated I've ever seen on the Web. Heaven...![On preview, I see it's been linked twice before, by RJ Reynolds - of course! - but it definitely deserves a post all to itself.]
posted on May 10, 2002 - View this thread

Yet Another Artist Link, this guy is more of a GUI/Skin developer, but the imagination and detail he brings to it is amazing. He's been able to turn Winamp into a work of art like no other, time and time again.
posted on Aug 3, 2001 - View this thread