Once I was alive, an engraved portrait broadside of Thomas Baskerville c1699

BASKERVILLE, Thomas. "Once I was alive, and had Flesh did Thrive / But now I am a Skellitan. at 70." Engraved portrait broadside, c.1699.
 
Single sheet, 405 x 260 mm, printed on laid paper. Engraved portrait of Thomas Baskerville within an oval border, beneath his cryptic monogram and the extraordinary couplet, "Once I was alive, and had Flesh did Thrive / But now I am a Skellitan. at 70." Beneath the portrait is a seventeen-line autobiographical verse beginning "As shadows fly, So hours dye", recording Baskerville's birth in August 1636, his age of sixty-nine, and a visionary "second Birth" on 11 January 1666 when "A Ray of Light" entered his heart and proclaimed him "King of Jerusalem." A large and well-margined impression, with some light handling, minor surface marking and age-toning, but in very good or better condition overall.
 
Thomas Baskerville of Bayworth, near Sunningwell in Berkshire, was a seventeenth-century traveller, antiquary and collector whose surviving manuscripts contain topographical observations, inscriptions, antiquarian notes and miscellaneous curiosities gathered during his journeys. He intended to publish his writings and had this remarkable portrait engraved, apparently for use as a frontispiece, although the projected work never appeared.
 
The print is one of the more eccentric survivals of late seventeenth-century English portraiture. Baskerville presents himself not simply as antiquary and gentleman but through an intensely personal religious mythology. His verse describes a moment of spiritual rebirth in 1666 and concludes with the words "King of Jerusalem", while the macabre inscription above the portrait anticipates his own death.
 
The broadside is scarce. Institutional examples are recorded, including impressions in the British Museum and Folger Shakespeare Library, and the latter dates the print to c.1699. Provenance: Anne and F. G. Renier, the important collectors of popular printing, broadsides and ephemera, with the characteristic manuscript "Renier" and Anne Renier's initials "AR" in blue ink to the verso. The British Museum also holds an impression of this portrait formerly in the Renier collection, which suggests either they held multiple copies or the museum has F.G. Renier's copy.