The naturalist’s bird, framed for your wall.
Audubon, Gould, Catesby and the great archives of natural-history illustration are all in the public domain. We frame them as gallery prints, ready for A1, A2 or A3.
Why public domain matters.
The illustrations on this site are the work of 18th- and 19th-century naturalists who spent their lives in the field with a sketchbook, observing birds in flight and at rest, and producing some of the most accurate and visually striking documentation of the natural world ever made. Their work has long since entered the public domain. Republishing it isn’t just legal - it’s the right thing to do. These plates were intended to be seen.
Archive-grade sources
Every illustration in our catalogue is sourced from a museum open-access programme - the Met, the Rijksmuseum, the Smithsonian, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, the Wellcome Collection. No copyright risk, no licensing fees, no royalties.
Vector-true print files
Each poster is rendered as a print-ready PDF with the typography set in Helvetica and a typographic frame around the image. Send the file straight to any print shop or to our fulfilment partner.
A1, A2 or A3
The frame adapts proportionally so the image reads at the right scale, whether you hang it as a single A1 feature or in an A3 series. The default mat colour can be swapped for a clean white ground for the minimal-interior look.
Where these illustrations come from.
We curate from the best of the open natural-history archives. The illustrators below worked across two centuries; the institutions below are responsible for the digitisation programmes that make their work available today.
John James Audubon
The American ornithologist whose Birds of America (1827–1838) remains the definitive folio of North American birds. 435 hand-coloured plates, each engraved life-size on double-elephant folio sheets. The plates are in the public domain and the highest-resolution scans are available from the University of Pittsburgh and the Audubon Society.
audubon.org →John Gould
The British “bird man”, prolific producer of folios covering Britain, Europe, Australia, the Himalayas, and his celebrated monograph on hummingbirds. Gould’s plates are renowned for the painterly handling of plumage and the decorative inclusion of foliage.
wikimedia commons →Mark Catesby
The first European naturalist to systematically document the flora and fauna of the American southeast. The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1731–43) predates Audubon by nearly a century and shows North American birds in their habitat for the first time.
BHL →Edward Lear
Best known today for his limericks, but earlier in his career Lear was one of the foremost zoological illustrators of his era. His Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots (1832) is considered among the finest folio works on parrots ever produced.
wikimedia commons →Maria Sibylla Merian
Pioneering naturalist and entomological illustrator. Though best known for her work on butterflies and metamorphosis, Merian also documented birds and birds-of-paradise from her travels in Surinam. Her observational accuracy was unmatched in her generation.
rijksstudio →Joseph Wolf
The German animal artist Sir Edwin Landseer called “the best all-around animal artist that ever lived.” Wolf illustrated Gould’s later books, the Zoological Society transactions, and his own Zoological Sketches. His birds of prey are particularly striking.
wikimedia commons →The Biodiversity Heritage Library
A consortium of natural-history and botanical libraries digitising the historic literature of biodiversity. Two million pages of natural-history publications scanned and made freely available, including most of the works featured on this site.
biodiversitylibrary.org →Smithsonian Open Access
Four million open-access images released under CC0 in 2020, including substantial natural-history holdings and original ornithological photographs. The Smithsonian remains the largest single source of public-domain wildlife imagery in the world.
si.edu/openaccess →The Met (Open Access)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art released approximately 400,000 images of its collection under CC0 in 2017. The natural-history print holdings include Audubon, Gould, Selby and Wilson at archive-grade scan resolution.
metmuseum.org →Rijksmuseum Rijksstudio
The Dutch national gallery’s open-access programme releases full-resolution TIFFs of every work in its collection. Strong on Dutch and Belgian natural-history illustration plus the great Ottoman botanical and ornithological tradition.
rijksmuseum.nl →Start with these.
Each thumbnail jumps you into the builder with that species pre-loaded. Try the palette options - the warm-white and pure-white grounds give the minimal interior-design look, the traditional tints lean into the natural-history-archive aesthetic.
From plate to print, in three steps.
Pick a species
Browse the catalogue. Each bird is sourced from one of the archives listed above. Click any plate to start.
Choose a frame
Pick a palette and the size of your print. Gallery mode adds the typographic frame. Plate mode prints the illustration alone.
Order or download
We render a print-ready vector PDF. Order through us for archival paper delivery, or download and print elsewhere.