FELIS

Original 1660s 10 1/2 inch x 8 1/4 inch Etching titled FELIS

Print by Francis Barlow (1622 – 1704). Painter, draughtsman and occasional etcher. Until 2018 the date of his birth was assumed to be around 1626. Vertue says he came from Lincolnshire, and was apprenticed to the painter William Shepherd in London (II 135). His earliest dated work is a drawing of 1648 in the BM (Croft-Murray 1). In 1649 he etched a portrait of Princess Elizabeth as the frontispiece to Wace’s translation of Electra. In March 1650 he entered the Painter-Stainer’s Company together with Edmund Marmion and the painter Robert Walker, where he served a seven-year apprenticeship. He was principally a painter, but few of his canvases survive; but he was one of the finest English etchers of the century, as can be seen in his plates for Benlowe’s ‘Theophila’ and his greatest achievement the 1666 edition of Aesop, which he illustrated and published himself.

The etching is in very good condition with a few nicks down the left edge.