Cosse-de-pois en bloemenornamenten in een ovaal en een rechthoek c. 1602 - 1670

Claude Rivard made this print with etching in the seventeenth century. In it, an oval and a rectangle are filled with floral ornament. We can think about the social life of prints like this one in seventeenth-century Europe. Manuals and pattern books were increasingly common and played an important role in the standardization of design across Europe. Etchings, like this one, were a relatively inexpensive way to circulate designs. Rivard was French, and we can imagine prints like these being used to inform design in luxury trades, such as tapestry and goldsmithing. These trades were patronized by the court, so an image like this can tell us something about the values of absolutist, early modern France. Studying images like this helps us to understand the ways in which art and design were circulated and consumed in the early modern period. We can learn more about this by consulting inventories, guild records, and other archival sources.