The grammar of ornament - Public domain botanical illustration

The firm of William Day, later Day & Son, has been described as one of the largest and most prominent lithographic firms of the second third of the nineteenth century. Company documents record William Day’s business starting in 1823 although the first known lithograph was produced the following year. The firm was granted the status of ‘Lithographers to Queen Victoria and to the Queen Dowager, Queen Adelaide’ in 1837 although they were not the only lithographers to be awarded the Royal Warrant. The 1850s started with a prize medal at the Great Exhibition for their display of lithography.

This large AI-assisted collection comprises about 60,000 images of botanical drawings and illustrations. It spans from the 14th to 19th century. As of today, we estimate the total number of botanical illustrations in our archive as 200,000 and growing. The "golden age" of botanical illustration is generally considered to be the 18th and 19th centuries, a time when there was a great deal of interest in botany and a proliferation of botanical illustrations being produced. During this period, many of the great botanical illustrators of the time, such as Maria Sybilla Merian, Pierre-Joseph Redouté, and John James Audubon, were active and produced some of the most iconic and influential botanical illustrations of all time. In addition to being used for scientific purposes, botanical illustrations were also highly prized for their beauty and were often used to decorate homes and other public spaces. Many of the most famous botanical illustrations from this period are still admired and collected today for their beauty and historical significance. All large Picryl collections were made possible with the development of neural image recognition. We made our best to reduce false-positive image recognition to under 5%.