Seventeenth-Century Baby Clothes? The Problems of Identification

Abstract

This article follows a study of a collection of baby clothes assumed to be of late seventeenth-century date to ascertain whether or not that assumption might be correct. The collection is unusual in containing caps, rare in themselves but also decorated with lace frills in the adult frelange style; a rare pair of sleeves with paned oversleeves; and christening and other items for wear by a swaddled infant which are more common in known collections but here, more unusually, trimmed with Flemish bobbin lace. The article discusses the items in terms of their relationships with each other, their construction, their fabrics and how they were worn. Comparisons with similar and related articles in other collections and in seventeenth-century portraits of adults and children enable the author to conclude that the articles probably do date from the late seventeenth century but from slightly different decades.