Discover the atmospheric beauty of nineteenth-century natural history with two extraordinary French bird illustrations featuring a Barn Owl and European Nightjar, professionally restored from an original antique plate.
Whether you're designing textiles, wallpaper, stationery, branding, packaging, home décor, fine art prints, editorial layouts, or mixed-media artwork, this Atelier Editions™ collection provides beautifully restored, production-ready artwork that integrates effortlessly into your creative workflow.
Meticulously restored from an original hand-colored engraving in my personal collection, these illustrations preserve the beauty, character, and wonderfully intricate detail of the original artwork while providing the flexibility today's designers expect.
No tedious masking or background removal. The restored illustrations have been professionally isolated and prepared as high-resolution PNG files, making it easy to incorporate them directly into your designs.
Created from an exceptionally high-resolution professional scan, these illustrations retain remarkable detail and provide the flexibility needed for everything from stationery and editorial layouts to large-format prints, wallpaper, and surface pattern design.
Work with the beautifully restored original coloring, enhanced hand-colored versions, isolated birds, or black-and-white artwork. Both opaque and transparent black-and-white versions are included, making it easy to recolor, layer, and transform the illustrations for contemporary designs.
The beautiful typography from the nineteenth-century plate has also been carefully extracted and provided separately, allowing you to incorporate authentic French natural-history lettering into collages, prints, stationery, editorial designs, and other creative projects.
Create products for sale with confidence using artwork professionally prepared for commercial creative projects. (Please refer to the Terms of Use for complete terms.)
All artwork is supplied as high-resolution PNG files.
These remarkable bird illustrations originate from the nineteenth-century French Dictionnaire universel d'histoire naturelle, the monumental natural-history encyclopedia directed by French naturalist Charles Henry Dessalines d'Orbigny and published in Paris between 1841 and 1849.
The original hand-colored plate depicts a Barn Owl (Strix flammea, as identified on the original plate) and European Nightjar or (Engoulevent ordinaire) (Caprimulgus Europaeus), surrounded by beautifully rendered branches and foliage.
One particularly charming detail is the word Oiseaux (“birds”) in the original plate heading. Its ornate nineteenth-century letterforms make the final x look surprisingly like an r to modern eyes. The distinctive original typography has been preserved as it appears on the antique plate and is also provided separately for creative use.
The artwork in this collection has been carefully restored from an original plate in my personal collection while preserving the engraving's fine linework, historical character, and original hand coloring. An additional enhanced-color version offers greater richness and creative flexibility while retaining the character of the antique original.
Additional historical information about the publication and artwork is included in the accompanying Curator's Notes PDF.
Exceptional historic artwork from the Leslie Nicole Archive, meticulously restored by hand and thoughtfully prepared for today's creative professionals. Explore Atelier Editions™ →
