Welcome to our new website! This has been a long time coming for us so it's a great pleasure to finally get it in front of an audience.
From our early days of selling DVDs of public domain pictures both through our craft supplies business and via eBay, I have been in love with pictures.
Actually, perhaps it wasn't from that time, I think it has always been part of me. I loved books when I was a child but was it the reading I loved or the pictures? I suspect the latter. I used to go back to my books time and time again, but not to read the words; I would flick to my favourite pictures and just stare at them for ages (in the end the books would naturally fall open in the right place anyway!).
Those early books included a fairy-tale compendium with a beautiful picture of Cinderella in her ball gown and a book of nature called 'The Tall Green House' with illustrations by Neave Parker. Amazingly I still have the latter 50 years later as I could never bear to part with it, although the pictures are sadly not out of copyright yet.
There have been millions of illustrated books published, and artworks created in history. The earliest illuminated manuscripts in Europe (i.e. handwritten books with pictures) date from the 5th century AD or CE (common era). Earlier cultures, such as the Egyptians, had illustrated texts (on scrolls, so perhaps we wouldn’t call them ‘books’) millennia before this. The relatively modern Book of Kells (from c.800 AD or CE) contains some beautiful colour illustrations.
For most of the early history of book printing, illustrations were printed in black and white and then hand coloured. It wasn't until the middle of the nineteenth century that printers developed lithographic processes that made colour printing economically viable for trade books. Coloured advertisements, maps, posters, can and box labels, trading cards, and catalogues still made up the bulk of the printing industry's output. Trade books with colour illustrations accounted for only a fraction of the work.
The 1880s to the 1930s is marked as the 'Golden Age of Illustration'. Though it will never be officially considered a historic period in art movements, it was a period of illustrative excellence that saw the mass production of arts, where arts were cheaply produced and enjoyed by many. Many fine Illustrators emerged in this period who were in high demand. This was a time when two popular official art movements were joined; Art Nouveau from 1880s to 1910s and Art Deco from 1910s to 1940s. Thus, the Golden Age of Illustration was a period of outstanding excellence in graphic arts, illustration in books, magazines, posters and other printed media.
At Public Domain Image Library, we aim to hold a repository of these images, together with the work of fine artists, that are now out of copyright and can be used for any purpose. We do not look to separate fine artists from illustrators as both streams provide valuable images that can be used for so many purposes. What we do want to do is revive, research and preserve those images from both famous and not-so-well-known artists so that they might be enjoyed for many years to come.
We have got thousands of images that haven't yet made it to the website so new artists and images will constantly be added. We'd like some help from you on this - if there is a particular artist or image/set of images that you're looking for, please let us know as this may well direct us with what we upload next.