A century of bird-watching, framed for your wall.
Postersurf is a project to make the great natural-history illustrations of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries available as gallery-grade prints. Every illustration in our catalogue is in the public domain. Every print is rendered from archive-quality scans released by museums and biodiversity libraries.
The principle
For three hundred years, the act of looking at birds was an act of science as much as one of beauty. Naturalists carried sketchbooks into the field, lived alongside their subjects, and rendered them with an accuracy that photography would not match for a hundred years more. John James Audubon worked for a quarter of a century on Birds of America, painting every plate life-size. John Gould crossed continents to document hummingbirds. Mark Catesby walked Carolina a century before the United States existed.
The work entered the public domain decades ago. The right to reproduce it is yours, ours, anyone’s. What we add is curation, a clean typographic frame, and a print pipeline that turns an archive scan into something you can hang on a wall.
The sources
We curate from the major open-access programmes of the natural-history world. Three institutions in particular do disproportionate work for open culture:
The Biodiversity Heritage Library
A consortium of natural-history libraries that has been digitising the historic biodiversity literature since 2006. Two million scanned pages from books and journals dating back to the 1500s, including most of Gould, Audubon, Catesby, Lear and Wolf. Their Flickr account curates the most striking plates from across the corpus and is the single best starting point for anyone interested in the genre.
Smithsonian Open Access
In 2020 the Smithsonian released approximately four million images from its collections under CC0 - the most liberal possible licence. This includes the National Museum of Natural History’s ornithological holdings, original wildlife photographs from the early 20th century onward, and the bird specimens digitised for scientific reference.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Met released roughly 400,000 images of works in its collection under CC0 in 2017. Their print collection includes archive-grade scans of Audubon’s double-elephant folio plates, Gould’s parrot monographs, and the major 19th-century European bird folios.
Rijksmuseum Rijksstudio
The Dutch national gallery has released full-resolution TIFFs of every work in its collection. Their holdings are strong on the Dutch and Belgian natural-history tradition, on Ottoman and Persian botanical illustration, and on the early-modern emblem books that informed how Europeans first imagined exotic species.
The illustrators
We’ll be adding biographical sketches of each illustrator as the catalogue grows. For now, the homepage sources section has a short paragraph on each of the founding figures of the genre - Audubon, Gould, Catesby, Lear, Merian, Wolf.
What you can do with our prints
Every print is a vector PDF. Once you’ve downloaded it (or had it printed by us), the file is yours. You can:
- Print as many copies as you like for your own use.
- Reframe, reformat, or modify the file - the underlying illustration is public domain.
- Hang it in a domestic, commercial or institutional setting.
We don’t claim copyright on the illustration itself. The typographic frame we wrap around it - the layout, font choices, captions, metadata - is a design we created and licensed to you for the print you bought, but the bird in the middle was always free.
About the team
Postersurf is built by Shout Websites, a small UK-based studio. The render engine, the typography, the curation and the print pipeline are all developed in-house. Print fulfilment is handled by a partner network in the UK, EU and US for fast regional shipping.
If you have a question about a specific plate, want to suggest a species or illustrator we should add, or would like to commission a custom series for a hospitality, retail or institutional setting, please get in touch.