Pictish Man Holding a Human Head

LEARN NC:

Hand-colored version of Theodor de Bry’s engraving of a Pict (a member of an ancient Celtic people from Scotland). De Bry’s engraving, “The true picture of one Pict,” was originally published as an illustration in Thomas Hariot’s 1588 book A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia.

The Pict stands with a shield in his left hand, and a tall spear and disembodied human head in his right. Another head lies on the ground near the man’s left foot. The man wears only a large ring around his waist, from which a curved sword hangs behind him, and a smaller ring around his neck.

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.” An unidentified artist applied the color to this version of de Bry’s engraving.