Figure 12.—La Galerie du Palais. The fashionable crowd throngs the milliners’ counters in the Palais Royal. By Abraham Bosse, 1636. (Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.)
In England, the engravings were of a rather different style. Dutch prints of allegorical subjects were in vogue, and there are innumerable sets of prints of the seven Ages of mankind, the five senses, the four seasons, the continents, and the liberal arts, typified by real and imaginary figures in all styles of dress. Jean Barrà’s figure “Seeing” (fig. 13), with her looking glass and perspective glass, accompanied by the farsighted eagle, is illustrated here mainly because of its explanatory quatrain mentioning fashions.[26]
Figure 13.—Seeing, from a set of the Five Senses. Engraving by Jean Barrà, ca. 1625. (Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, London.)
Not until the early 1640s can reliable engravings of English fashions be found. Most of Wenceslas Hollar’s 1639 series, “Ornatus Muliebris Anglicanus, or, the severall habits of English women from the Nobilitie to the Country woman, as they are in these times,” is slightly suspect as being imaginary or at best idealized, though the lady in waiting (Hollar’s no. 23) and the country woman (Hollar’s no. 26) walking on her iron-ring pattens may be portraits. Hollar’s “Theatrum Mulierum or Aula Veneris” of 1644 has a much stronger claim to represent the fashions of London, although some of the European women may be in the traditional clothes of their cities and states. The full-length female figures of the seasons are really costume portraits set against London backgrounds[27] (fig. 14), and, although charming
in themselves, they are not true fashion plates, while those of the series of women’s heads in circles, which are not copied from other work, are simply portraits[28] of ladies whom Hollar actually knew in London. Notwithstanding his engravings of muffs,[29] it is most unlikely that Hollar had any connection with either a fashion house or a milliner’s shop in London.