Beautiful shell drawings by Winifred West now on the Archives website.

Volunteer Prue Walker has just uploaded these beautiful images to the Archives' website. They are a small selection of the collection of drawings we hold by Winifred West who worked as an artist at the Australian Museum between 1908 and 1912 and later founded girls' school Frensham in the NSW Southern Highlands. Our photography department has photo - shopped some of the backing boards out of the scans of the illustrations to show how they might look if published today -- 3-dimensional and stunningly detailed.

The original published version of one of West's drawings from Records of the Australian Museum in 1908 is here: https://media.australian.museum/media/Uploads/Journals/16806/955_complete.pdf (see p.21 of the pdf)

Compare it to the detail and colour in our new high-resolution scan of the original of the same drawing:


AMS546/27/1 bromide mockup
Illustration by Winifred West. Image: James King
© Australian Museum