ABSTRACT
The engraved record of nuns' portraits for an English readership took time to develop. Despite the current interest in English portraiture, there has been little interest shown in post-Reformation portraits of English nuns, possibly because examples of these have been dispersed widely, and because they do not appear to have any coherence as an artistic genre. This chapter discusses the scattered examples of these portraits and identifies their types and categories. The advantage of the lengthy period studied, 1600-1800, allows one to observe developments in the medium used and to relate these portraits to more general trends in portraiture in England and Europe. At the Reformation, nuns disappeared almost entirely from England and from public consciousness. In Catholic Europe, nuns, including English nuns, continued to be part of the local church, and the majority of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century portraits of English nuns have a continental origin. The engraved record of nuns' portraits for an English readership took time to develop.
