George Edwards Uncommon Birds Vintage Illustration Pack, 16 Printable Plates

A themed pack of 16 printable vintage plates from George Edwards's A Natural History of Uncommon Birds (London, 1743–1764), the great eighteenth-century bird book that introduced scores of American, Asian and African species to European readers; this pack gathers Edwards's own hand-coloured etchings together with contemporary German copies after his plates and two Cleveland Museum watercolour studies, made for junk journals, scrapbooking, card making, collage, decoupage and paper crafts. Print them at home, cut them out and layer them into your projects. The files are full-size original scans, so they are also big enough to frame as wall art.

Plates included: Brown Bird with Butterfly, American Bittern (Fedoa Americana), Brown Speckled Bird, Red and Black Bird, Red-headed Finch of Surinam, Guillemot and Puffin, Bird of Paradise, Long-tailed Birds, Blue-throated Waterfowl, Green and Orange Birds, Bird Study (Cleveland), Bird Study II (Cleveland), Brazilian Magpie (after Edwards), Whooping Crane (after Edwards), White Cockatoo (after Edwards), Mexican Green Parrot (after Edwards).

Print size: Full-size original museum and library scans, never resized: about 4,000–6,500 px on the long edge. Every plate prints sharp up to about 9 × 13 in at 300 dpi (based on the smallest plate; most go larger), and down to A4, US Letter or A5 with no loss. The shapes vary slightly because they're original book pages.

Files: 16 high-resolution JPGs, about 4,000–6,500 px on the long edge (140 MB total), delivered as one zip download.

Source: Hand-coloured etchings by George Edwards from A Natural History of Uncommon Birds, National Gallery of Art open-access scans; plus Johann Michael Seligmann and Johann Sebastian Leitner coloured copies after Edwards (NGA); and two bird-study watercolours from the Cleveland Museum of Art (CC0), all via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain: Edwards died in 1773, Seligmann in 1762 and Leitner in the late 1700s, and the plates were published mid-eighteenth century.

Digital file only. No physical item will be shipped.