Follow-up: Elizabeth I's Rainbow Portrait Gown

The Rainbow Portrait (public
domain photo found on
Wikimedia Commons)

As a follow-up to my post on the Bacton Altar Cloth, here's a video about current efforts to make a reconstruction of the elaborately embroidered gown Elizabeth I is wearing in the Rainbow Portrait.  That reconstruction, when completed, will join the Bacton Altar Cloth at the exhibition at Hampton Court Palace.

For the curious, further information about this famous portrait can be found here, here, and here, which are three different sections of the same web article.  Another analysis may be found here.

The  first article I linked to above makes the bold and interesting claim that the painting had to have been done by a French miniatures painter by the name of Issac Oliver, because the features shown on the Queen are those of Oliver himself!  (Note:  Current scholarship does not agree that Oliver was the person who painted the portrait.)  A photograph of the portrait is shown to the left of this post.  As always, clicking on the photograph should bring up a larger and clearer copy of the image. 

Pskov Re-Creation Project--Introduction

In 2007, shortly after reading Peter Beatson's summary of the Pskov fabric find, I decided to attempt my own reconstruction of a costume represented by a substantial collection of textile fragments found in a birchbark box in one of the graves.

The textiles included fragments of the neckline, hem and cuffs of what were assumed to be part of a linen shift or undertunic; the hem and cuffs were trimmed with wide strips of what appears to have been red silk. The other fragment was about five feet (152 cm) long and 9 inches (25 cm) wide. It was made of blue-colored linen, but was trimmed with three strips of colored silk, two of which were blue, one of which reddish and was patterned. This piece is believed to be the remains of an apron dress, because it was found wrapped around a pair of large tortoise brooches with blue linen loops still inside them.

I plan to reconstruct both the shift and the apron dress as part of this project. I've supplied links to all of the photographs because I am hoping to get feedback from my readers, both as to the viability and correctness of the Pskov archaeological team's proposed reconstruction and on my own thoughts about how to reconstruct these garments.

Note: the photos I have reference in this post were linked to by Peter Beatson, but came from the Pskov team's website, which is written in Russian. The original Russian web page seems now to be unavailable, but a translation into English of that site by Lisa Kies is available here. EDIT: I have revised the entry to show the photographs as they appear in Lisa Kies's translation of the Pskov's team's former website.