Habit of Woman of Africa in 1581

by Thomas Jefferys

In the middle of the eighteenth century, Thomas Jefferys' hand-colored engraving provides an unusual, formalized view of how Europeans saw African identity. "Habit of Woman of Africa" is not simply a representation of clothing; instead, it depicts the merging of textile design and social position.

This image represents an era when European artists were challenged in their attempts to combine the exotic and the increasingly popular scientific quest for ethnographic exactitude.