Historical Illustration Search
1,492,199 images. Source datasets on Hugging Face: British Library and Encyclopaedia Britannica.
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Try a wider date range, another image type or a different description.
Browse the collections
Follow the illustrations through time, without a search query.
Dates refer to the source publication. Undated images appear last when included.
Choose a collection or start with all illustrations.
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An atlas of illustrations
Explore a British Library sample, arranged by visual similarity.
This map currently contains British Library images only. Search covers both collections.
Sample map
Drag to pan · double-click to zoom here
Use Select to draw a region, or select the current view.
Choose an image to inspect it or find similar images across both collections.
How to read this map
This map currently shows a fixed, uniform sample of 6,000 British Library images, projected from the existing SigLIP2 embeddings using UMAP. Each dot is an image; zooming reveals more thumbnails. The sample can miss rare subjects. Select draws a lasso around all enclosed dots, including images without a visible thumbnail; Select view is a keyboard-friendly alternative. Selections stay as you pan and filter.
Local neighbourhoods can be useful for discovery, but gaps, apparent islands and distances are approximate. The axes have no named meaning. “Find similar” clears the search filters and searches both collections using the full search index. You can then narrow the results in Search.