John Blackwall, London, 1861 to 1864
Blackwall's history appeared in two parts for the Ray Society, in 1861 (plates I to XII) and 1864 (plates XIII to XXIX). The 29 hand-colored plates carry 1,094 lettered drawings, and the species are numbered 1 to 272. Many British spiders were first described here. 497 of the drawings are shown on this page; the others are uncolored line drawings of details such as palps, eyes and spinners, which are on Wikimedia Commons.
The figures are cut from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology copy on the Internet Archive. The plate scans are on Wikimedia Commons, together with the figures cut from them. The plate number on each figure's card links to its plate there.
Every figure shown appears once, in the order of the animals. The families follow a rough evolutionary sequence. In the larger families the subfamilies come next, alphabetically, then genera and species alphabetically by their current names.
Each figure was cut from the scans and cleaned of stains, show-through text and plate edges by scripts written with the help of Claude, an AI assistant. The scripts build a mask around each animal semi-automatically, and the masks were corrected by hand where needed. Every pixel of a figure comes from the scan; no image was redrawn or generated by AI.
Blackwall's own names are given as printed. Current names and families come from the World Spider Catalog, with GBIF for the few names it does not list. The figures are public domain.