☛ Agence Eureka: colored wood engraving from Précis d’histoire naturelle à l’usage des candidats au baccalauréat de philosophie et de mathématiques by Antoine Pizon, 1930, detail from plate V, p. 238. Public Domain.

Agence Eureka uploaded 13 of those gorgeous colored engravings recently. All the images link to one of Agence Eureka’s Flickr sets where they can be downloaded in a large format (for example, the one displayed above is available in a 2801 x 1769 size).

All those plates come from an academic manual titled Précis d’histoire naturelle à l’usage des candidats au baccalauréat de philosophie et de mathématiques written by Antoine Pizon (1860-1942) and edited in Paris in 1930 by Gaston Douin. The book which is cloth-bounded has 622 pages, 474 black-and-white, wood-engraved illustrations, as well 16 colored plates (see details over at CNDP Mnemosyne). The 1930 version corresponds to the 6th edition of the book. The book was regularly re-edited in France well into the 40’s. Copies can still be bought online at a very reasonable price (see eBay.fr or AbeBooks for example). Antoine Pizon authored numerous academic books related to anatomy, zoology, botany, etc. (see IdRef.fr for a partial list of known publications).

The illustrations themselves ―at least those colored wood engravings― were drawn by Georges Devy, an artist specialized in anatomical illustrations who died in 1902 (see “Petite histoire de l’iconographie anatomique” by P. Huart and M.-J. Imbault-Huart, p. 39; PDF) and engraved by Swiss artist Edmond Boulenaz (1859-1905: see the Swiss Institute for Art Research). Devy and Boulenaz previously worked together on Léo Testut’s famous Traité d’anatomie humaine in four volumes (available at Archive.org and Gallica).