I always enjoy a good dig around our digitised collections for different celebrations and days as there’s always something new to find. For valentines day I tried a whole gamut of search terms and came across this fabb wee grouping of fancy dress ball attendees. Each image in this collection is a hand coloured engraving by F. Stöber after a drawing by P. v. Stubenrauch of figures dressed as characters from a variety of Walter Scott’s novels as worn at a themed costume ball in Vienna in 1826.

Click on any of the images in the viewer below to zoom in and really enjoy the details of their costumes and the absolutely delightful poses and expressions the ball-goers are throwing at each other.

You can also view the images directly in our images.ed.ac.uk Luna viewer.

 

Header Image: Cropped section from Der Costum-Ball, 1826, ©University of Edinburgh, Full Public Access