During the 1640s, Hollar produced a series of still life etchings with a focus on fashion, perhaps to complement his other contemporary series on women’s dress and his female personifications. The present examplle features a selection of luxury accessories including fur muffs, a lace handkerchief, a fan, gloves, a pin-cushion, gauntlets and a mask.

Monteyne has hypothesised that the muff plays a symbolic role in Hollar’s work:

“The fur muff in these etchings is shown to be an enigmatic entity, not only intersecting with issues related to fetishism, eroticism and urban space in early modern London, but is also poised on a threshold between different economies of the object, between residual classical and medieval systems of representation and newly emergent anxieties about the commodity and exchange value.”