OurCuratedVintageAnimalPrintCollection

Vintage Animal Wall Art Prints

A menagerie rather than a wildlife collection. Most of these come from Charles Dessalines d’Orbigny’s natural-history plates, and he drew everything, not only the glamorous ones — so the sloth, the aye-aye, the pangolin and the long-eared bat sit alongside the jaguar and the hippopotamus. The second strand is English and equine: Stubbs’s zebra, Agasse’s grey pony and black charger, and a run of saddled hunters. Where our vintage bird prints are all plumage and colour, these are anatomy and character.

The palette is muted and papery — buff and sepia grounds, soft browns and greys, with colour arriving only where the animal insists on it. That restraint is why they hold a wall without dominating the room. And they have something a plant study never will: a face. An animal looking out of a frame changes a room in a way a leaf cannot.

How to hang them

Watch which way the animal faces. A pair reads as a conversation when the two look towards each other and as an argument when they look away — that matters more than the spacing between them. The horses and the larger creatures are landscape prints and want a long wall above a sideboard or a bench. The d’Orbigny plates are mostly portrait and hang well as a run of three or four at a single height. A single large animal above a desk or a console is the simplest option and rarely wrong. Our vintage fish prints come from the same tradition if you want to extend a group.

Each art print in this collection is available as a fine art Giclée print on premium 230gsm ultra-matte paper using archival inks, or as a mounted canvas — a premium imported 260gsm poly-cotton blend stretched over a 35mm Obeche timber frame. Sizes run A4 through to A0, unframed or framed in black, white, light oak or dark kiaat.