Published to celebrate 10 years of The Public Domain Review, this very special book of images gathers over 500 prints, paintings, illustrations, sketches, photographs, doodles, and everything in between, exploring connections across more than two millennia of visual culture.
The seasoned PDR reader will meet many favourites across the pages, but also a whole array of as-of-yet unshared delights dusted off especially for this volume. Assembled according to a dreamlike logic, the images unfurl in a single unbroken sequence, through a play of visual echoes and evolving thematic threads.
A collection of imagery from the Public Domain Review. I’m not a regular reader of the website, and most pieces were new to me.
I found a number of interesting works, though I thought it opened a bit slowly. Some of the affinities were a touch simplistic, I preferred ones that were more visual echoes or transformations and less two versions of the same thing. The extended notes were interesting where available.
Three spreads I enjoyed as affinities:
Artwork I liked:
- The Water Sprite by Theodor Kittelsen (1904)
- Group of Sunspots and Veiled Spots by Étienne Léopold Trouvelot (1882)
- Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds by Martin Johnson Heade (1871)
- Illustrations by Peter Newell from The Hole Book
- Illustrations by Virginia Frances Sterrett
- Calavera of the Cyclists (Calavera las biciletas) by José-Guadalupe Posada ( c. 1889-1895) — reminds me of Seattle artist Fiddlebones
- Winter Night in the Mountains by Harald Sohlberg (1914)
- Postmen of the Wilderness by Arthur Heming (1921)
- Studies on Twilight Phenomena, after Krakatoa by Eduard Pechuël-Loesche (1888)
Learned about:
- Collotypes — a form of photographic print
- Eidophone — creating images by singing
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