Saint Bridget of Sweden. Woodcut attributed to W.Y. Ottley.

"Besides these small cuts, however, the old artists of Germany and the Low Countries engraved devotional subjects of larger dimensions. One of these, bearing every mark of high antiquity, I am enabled to present to the reader, by favour of the Right Hon. the Earl Spencer, K. G. who possesses the original, and has most obligingly permitted it to be copied for the present work. By the inscription over the head of the figure, which is nevertheless, in part, unintelligible, being a good deal rubbed, we discover that it was intended to represent St. Bridget, who is seated writing. The figure evinces itself the work of an artist of no mean talents: the proportions are good; the attitude is easy and natural; and the folds of the drapery are marked with intelligence, and well cast. The face and hands are expressed with few lines, but in a masterly manner. On the other hand, the total absence of every principle of perspective, in the bench upon which St. Bridget is seated, and the desk which supports her book, is very remarkable; and gives to the entire composition an effect not very unlike that of the figures of the Evangelists, sometimes found in manuscripts of the very early centuries. Upon the whole, I am inclined to consider this engraving as the production of an artist of the Low Countries, (where a better style of art prevailed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, than was common, in those times, in Germany,) and of a date not later than the close of the fourteenth century : since, after that period, an artist, who was capable of designing so good a figure, could scarcely have been so grossly ignorant of every effect of linear perspective, as was evidently the case with the author of the performance before us. …"--Ottley, loc. cit.