3-065-863 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

"A Gipsy," by Richter, 1874. Engraving of a painting which '...closely indicate[s] the picturesque characteristics of the Roumany tribes, which this little waif embodies so vividly, and which the picture reproduces with so much truth and spirit. Few things are more remarkable in the history of humanity than the isolation of the gipsy race...the gipsies possess, it seems, scarcely any religion whatever. Yet, contemned and despised outcasts as they are, placed as they have been under the ban of every country and creed of Europe, they, notwithstanding, preserve every trait, and even a language, that bespeaks their origin in the far East; they still regard themselves as forming the aristocracy of wild nature; and to this day it is for them a degradation worse than death to ally themselves to the Christian. This little urchin is a pure type of his breed. We see it in the rough and ragged garments with which he is partially clad, in his bronzed skin tanned to a deeper hue by exposure to all weathers, in that matted shock of unkempt raven hair, in that fervid face all athirst for fresh adventure; in those gleaming, restless black eyes, so full of intelligence, that must, perforce, degenerate into cunning'. From the Fine Art Supplement to the "Illustrated London News", 1874.