The True Picture of a Young Daughter of the Picts

About this illustration

Creator

Theodor de Bry

Date created

1585–1586

License

This work is believed to be in the public domain. Users are advised to make their own copyright assessment and to understand their rights to fair use.

Source

Original image housed by Documenting the American South / UNC Libraries

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Learn more

• Search LEARN NC for colonial, drawings, Great Britain, illustrations, John White, North Carolina, Picts, Scotland, and Virginia.

In the classroom

• See our collection of articles on visual literacy for ideas on using photographs meaningfully in the classroom.

“The Trvve Picture of a Yonge Dowgter of the Pictes.” Theodor de Bry’s engraving of a young Pict woman (a member of an ancient Celtic people from Scotland), published in Thomas Hariot’s 1588 book A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. The woman stands with a long spear held upright in her left hand. She wears only a large ring around her waist, from which a curved sword hangs behind her, and a smaller ring around her neck. Much of her body appears to be painted or tattooed. In the background, buildings and people are visible on rolling hills.

Theodor de Bry was a Flemish-born engraver and publisher who based his illustrations for Hariot’s book on the paintings of colonist John White. Most of the book’s illustrations depict the native people encountered by Hariot and White on their North American expedition, but A Brief and True Report also contains five engravings of the Picts and their neighbors in ancient Scotland. De Bry included these images “to show how that the inhabitants of the Great Bretannie have been in times past as savage as those of Virginia.”

The text accompanying this image reads:

The young daughters of the Picts, did also let their hair flying, and were also painted over all the body, so much that no men could not find any different, if they had not use of another fashion of painting, for they did paint themselves of sundry kinds of flowers, and of the fairest that they could find, being furnished for the rest of such kinds of weapon as the women were as you may see by this present picture a thing truly worthy of admiration.