Rare book illustrations, 1558 to 1798
This collection of images (mostly engravings) was taken from Library and Archives Canada’s rare book collection. The images are pulled from exploration or missionary books and depict locations or events in Canada before 1800. They also track re-engravings or variants of certain images over time.
On this page
Search help
In one of the top boxes, enter keywords like “voyage,” “children,” “plants,” or “birds”
- If you know what you’re looking for, use the subject field to limit the number of results
You can also search by
- date
- author
- title
- artist or engraver
- A book could have credits for the author, the artist who created the image, and the engraver who created the print
- This information is limited, so it’s better to search by author or title
- publisher
- Start typing a name to get options
- place of publication
- Choose a place from the list
- subject
- Based on Library of Congress subject headings, such as daisies, swallows, hunting, Indigenous peoples, Indigenous women, ships
- OCLC number
- Library ID number. It is useful for finding all the illustrations in one book
About the illustrations
For many of the images in this collection, we have included more than one copy. This is because of restrikes and variants that appeared in different editions, printings, and formats of the books.
See our Aurora list for information such as author and publisher for all the books.
The images that appeared in these printed books were made from wooden blocks or metal plates. Woodcuts were produced by a relief process much like printing, while copper engravings—made using an intaglio, or recessed, process—were printed separately from the text. The wooden blocks or metal plates were often kept after all the prints needed for the publication were printed. We divided subsequent printings from these blocks into two categories: restrikes and variants.
Restrikes include
- new images made from a plate with no major changes to the original
- two printers using the same images to share the costs of printing
- images in a book printed in two formats, for example, a pocket format for the public and a larger format for libraries and collectors
- another print run made by the same printer using the same plates but with a new date
- metal plates refreshed by engravers who deepened lines and re-engraved details with no major changes
- leftover copies from a print run that were given a new title page later or sold to a new printer, where the plates and text remain the same except for the title page
Variants include
- new images made from a plate with major changes to the original
- metal plates refreshed by engravers who deepened lines and re-engraved details with major changes
- illustrations copied from other books
- Note: many of the variants presented on this site are mirror images of the originals because a printed image is the mirror image of the design engraved on the plate, so a design copied to a plate directly from an original image ends up being the reverse of the original when printed. Sometimes the copies were copied and the end product only faintly resembled the original image
Lahontan illustrations
Lahontan Illustration
The first image, a frontispiece from Lahontan's Nouveaux voyages de Mr. le baron de Lahontan dans l'Amérique septentrionale [...], was re-engraved to produce four separate variants.
Travel books like this were often translated by foreign publishers. This meant that illustrations were copied and interpreted by engravers who were of different artistic schools than the engravers of the original, which could lead to noticeable differences.
Ellis illustrations
An illustration from Ellis’s A Voyage to Hudson’s-Bay […] was copied several times after the appearance of the originals.
Soon after its publication in 1748, the illustration was re-engraved in two French translations and one Dutch translation; 26 years later, it was picked up again in Abbé Prévost’s Histoire générale des voyages, ou, Nouvelle collection de toutes les relations de voyages par mer et par terre...
The Indigenous people in the images, as originally drawn by Henry Ellis, look very different when interpreted by a Parisian engraver of the court of Louis XVI.
Access the images
All the images are available online. If you would like to see the original images on site in Ottawa, ask us a question and provide the reference to the image.