The True Picture of a Man of a Nation Neighbor Unto the Pict

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 Man of Nation Neigbour Vnto the Picte.” Theodor de Bry’s engraving of a member of a people neighboring the Picts in ancient Scotland. The illustration was published in Thomas Hariot’s 1588 book A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. The man stands with a long spear in his right hand, facing left. He wears a simple garment, and a curved sword hangs behind him from a belt around his waist. In the background three men holding long spears stand on a foot path, next to a body of water on which several ships are sailing.

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:

There was in the said great Bretainne yet another nation neighbor unto the Picts, which did apparel themselves with a kind of cassock other cloth Ierkin [?], the rest of the body were naked. They did also wear long hairs, and their mustaches, but the chin were also shaved as the other before. They did wear a large girdle about them, in which hang a crooked sword, with the target, and did carry the pick or the lance in their hand, which hath at the low end a round bowl, as you may see by this picture.