Eva Vliegen, a woman who lived off the smell of flowers. Drawing after B. Flessiers.

1 drawing : pencil with pen and ink and grey wash ; sheet 18.7 x 12 cm

The pourtrayture of Eva Fliegen the miraculous mayd that liued at Muers in Cleveland without food ætat 40 ... Lettering continues: "Twas I that pray'd I never might eate more (Cause my stepmother grutched me my food) Whether on flowers I feed: as I had slore: Or on a dew that every morning stood. Like honey on my lips full seaventeene years This a truth if you the truth will heare."

The portrait (though not the surrounding strapwork) appears to be derived from a painting in Ons' Lieve Heer op Solder, Amsterdam (chapel and museum), attributed to Balthasar Flessiers I or II, dated 1614, as transmitted by an engraving by Andries Jacobsz. Stock, as subsequently copied in an English engraving by an anonymous engraver and with the strapwork border added. The English print was published in London in the reign of James I (1603-1625) successively by three different publishers (Sudbury and Humble; George Humble; and William Peak): Hind, loc. cit.

A.M. Hind, Engraving in England in the sixteenth & seventeenth centuries, part II: the reign of James I, Cambridge 1955, p. 372, no. 16 and pl. 229 (the English engraving)

Wellcome Collection 1931i

Copied from an English engraving. The author of the drawing has mistranscribed some elements of the lettering from the engraving