updated: 21/11/2007








Unlike the sixteenth century no one face haunts us from the seventeenth century. But there are a few contenders: not least Milady de Winter and Anne of Austria as imagined from Dumas.
And yes I do know that queen Anne actually reigned at the begining of the eighteenth century but I’ve chosen to see her as the last of the seventeenth-century Stuarts and to regard the eighteenth century in the UK as begining with the arrival of the Hanoverians.
As with other period makeup sub-sections the characters shown here are an indiscriminate mixture of real persons and fictional characters. Also ordinary people are heavily under-represented: fashion was largely a matter for the rich.