Antiquarian fish prints might be the little luxury you didn’t know you needed

Fish are depicted in some of the earliest cave paintings and feature in Grecian and Roman friezes, floor mosaics and on terracotta vases. Some of the most aesthetically beautiful and scientifically useful of all fish pictures, however, are those that appear on paper, generally published in books from the middle of the 16th century.

Two of the first illustrated fish books were by Frenchmen: Pierre Belon in 1553 and Guillaume Rondelet a year later. These feature small woodcut engravings of several hundred fish and other aquatic creatures, alongside occasional imaginary ‘monsters’; Belon is infamous for his ‘sea monk’.

The first ever coloured book of fish by the French émigré book dealer (and alleged spy) Louis Renard, Poissons ecrivisses et crabes (1719), features a less-than-glamorous picture of a mermaid among its depictions of multi-hued tropical fish from Indonesian waters. All these works were produced with scientific intent, but undoubtedly will have also served as valued library pieces for wealthy collectors.

Almost contemporary with Belon and Rondelet was the Italian Ippolito Salviani, who was a doctor with close links to senior figures in Rome, including several successive popes. He was ahead of his time using the more delicate copper engraving technique and he included no monsters in his line up of almost 100 fish and some cephalopods. His exquisite, folio-sized images are considered by many — including the most celebrated ichthyologist of all time, Georges Cuvier — to be the most scientifically accurate, not only of that period, but for several centuries hence.

These early engravings by Belon, Rondelet and Salviani were issued uncoloured, although many have subsequently been coloured to make them more attractive for the market. It is hard to believe that such wonderful engravings on ancient, watermarked paper have survived more than 450 years and yet can still be purchased as individual prints, extracted from loose or distressed copies of these books, for as little as tens of pounds from print dealers. They even occasionally pop up on eBay.

The first notable illustrated fish publication to appear in Britain was Historia Piscium, written by renowned Cambridge scholars Francis Willughby and John Ray in an era of enthusiastic natural-history collection and scientific drive. This book almost bankrupted the Royal Society in London, which published it at such great expense in 1686 that it couldn’t afford to publish Isaac Newton’s Principia, with his theories about gravity, the following year.

Historia Piscium was also issued uncoloured, but, from the mid to late 1700s, a crop of very fine coloured books focusing on British fish was published. One of the loveliest of these is by the Anglo-Irish naturalist Edward Donovan, The Natural History of British Fishes (1806). He took considerable efforts to paint his subjects ‘in the highest state of perfection, and while they yet glowed with the vivid hues of life’. His book featured common species, such as mackerel and cod, as well as rare visitors, including the opah. Remarkably, it received poor reviews at the time, although it is highly sought after nowadays.

Some of the most admired of all fish prints are by the German Marcus Elieser Bloch, from his book Naturgeschichte der Fische (1782). The bold copper engravings were handcoloured, often with specks of metallic paint and egg white to mimic the iridescence of a freshly caught fish, and all are highly collectible. I bought my first Blochs back in the 1990s for £50 a piece; now, they start at three or four times that price.

If game fish, trout and salmon are your thing, then two monographs and the engravings within will appeal most to you. Both were published in 1839 and are very rare. One is by Sir William Jardine, most famous for his mini Naturalist’s Library, but his British Salmonidae is massive — described as elephant folio— a nd has only 12 beautiful plates.

Perhaps more delicate and sumptuous still, although smaller, are the engravings by Louis Agassiz in his Histoire Naturelle des Poisons, completed before he decamped from Switzerland to almost single-handedly establish natural history as a discipline in the USA.

For the American market — and specifically targeted at anglers — two more folios of fish prints merit high praise. Both are later and no longer engravings, but rather chromolithographs produced from originals painted on stone. Samuel Kilbourne’s Game Fishes of the United States (1879) is large format (not quite elephant folio) and captures fish in their natural habitat, whereas Sherman Denton’s images for the U.S. Fisheries Report (1895) are smaller format, yet, I think, still present some of the most sublime ichthyological portraits ever.

I’ve been collecting prints of fish for nearly 40 years. It used to be a case of visiting antique-print dealers and fairs in the UK; further afield, Berlin, Amsterdam and Paris remain brilliant places to pick up beautiful examples at bargain prices. Today, it isn’t strictly necessary to venture out, as many dealers are on the internet and one of my favourite websites is Rare Fish & Marine Life Prints. Be warned, however, that adding to your haul can become extremely addictive.

Paul Martin is professor of cell biology at the University of Bristol.

This feature originally appeared in the July 8, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.'