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Portrait of an instrument-maker: Wenceslaus Hollar's engraving of Elias Allen

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 May 2004

HESTER HIGTON
HESTER HIGTON
Affiliation:
School of English, University of Exeter, Queen's Building, The Queen's Drive, Exeter EX4 4QH, UK.
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Abstract

Among the many engravings of landscapes, buildings, portraits and other illustrations produced by the seventeenth-century artist Wenceslaus Hollar, there are a small number of images of contemporary men of science. Of particular interest is the portrait of the instrument-maker Elias Allen, both because portraits of men of his social status were extremely uncommon at this time, and also because the cluttered mass of instruments shown in the image presents a picture wholly unlike other portraits of the period. The first part of this paper explores the position of portraiture as inherently linked to nobility, and seeks to present an explanation as to why the original oil painting of Allen (made by Hendrik van der Borcht and no longer extant) might have been made. The second part looks at the image itself, and discusses possible reasons for Hollar's production of the engraving some twenty years after the original.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , June 2004 , pp. 147 - 166
Copyright
2004 British Society for the History of Science

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Footnotes

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the ‘Portraiture and Scientific Identity’ conference held at the National Portrait Gallery in June 2000. I am grateful to all those who commented on that version, and particularly to Ludmilla Jordanova. My thanks also go to Jim Bennett and to staff at the University of Exeter, who gave advice on a later version of the work.