On Jan 14, 2008, at 19:55, Jane Partridge wrote:
A lot
of the portraits of the time were, I think, a 'from the stock painted
by
the apprentices' body with a 'snapshot' portrait of the head added by
the artist - if you look at old portraits, you will see an awful lot of
unrelated women wearing the same dress, in more or less the same
position!
That seems to be true even of earlier periods :)
For some months, I had been in correspondence with the Czartoryski
Foundation in Kraków (Poland), who are in posession of a series of
miniatures, painted by Lucas Cranach the Younger around 1556 and
depicting the Jagiellonian royal family. I had some postcards of the
series which seemed to show some of the members of the family wearing
lace (or something remarkably like it) and hoped that, given better
quality photos, I'd be able to tell. Well, a couple of months ago, I
got a CD from them, with each of the miniatures photographed nicely.
The photos were of good-enough quality to, essentially, dash my hopes
of seeing BL there (I think it's drawn-work). But.
I was amused to see that 3 of the "less important" sisters, all seemed
to be wearing the same -- very fancy -- dress. I had assumed that they,
each, borrowed the dress from the royal wardrobe for the sitting as
their turn for posing came up but the "switch the head" technique seems
to be a more likely answer, especially given that the pose is also the
same in all 3 instances (and, in all 3 instances, while the
embellishments on the dress are meticulously rendered, the body itself
has proportions that even a 9yr old might be embarassed to paint <g>)
Re:
In J R Planche's History of British Costume (published 1836), he
writes [...]
The hood and vardingale disappear, and with them the yellow
starched ruffs and bands". He goes on to say that it was apparently the
case of a Mrs Turner who went to the gallows for her part in a
poisoning, wearing a yellow ruff, [...]
*Yellow* "starched ruffs and bands"? *Yellow* ruff (on Mrs Turner)?
Yellow??? What "gives" here, does anyone know? Does Planche mean "gilt"
(metallic), or yellowed linen? And, if linen, how come it was allowed
to get yellow? This is the first time I've *ever* heard of yellow lace
and here he seems to be suggesting it was commonplace...
--
Tamara P Duvall http://t-n-lace.net/
Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
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