Visual and Written Sources on Traditional Clothing in Riga During the 18th and 19th Centuries (Data Description for TextileBase)

This data paper accompanies the dataset Visual and Written Sources on Traditional Clothing in Riga During the 18th and 19th Centuries (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.16995555).  The dataset represents a 2025 snapshot of the ongoing collection Secondary Sources of Dress and Textile History, restricted to items relating specifically to Riga. It brings together visual and written sources depicting the clothing of common people, with a particular focus on traditional garments and accessories. Because very few items of traditional dress from Riga survive, these sources provide crucial evidence for the study of dress history.

The dataset includes over one hundred depictions by Johann Christoph Brotze from the late eighteenth century, preserved in the Library of the University of Latvia, as well as paintings and lithographs from the first half of the nineteenth century by Carl Traugott Fechhelm, Johann von Radetzky, Theodor Heinrich Rickmann, Franz Seraph Hanfstaengl, and Carl Gotthard Hess. Each entry records the holding institution, inventory number, author, title, description, type of image, place, and date.

While the published dataset is archived on Zenodo as an RDF dump, it is best explored via the TextileBase interface, which presents items in their full relational context. In TextileBase, entries can be navigated from the detail of a figure TXB:Q846 (a prosperous Polish Jew, detail of Brotze III/55), to the complete plate TXB:Q788, and finally to the entire ten-volume collection TXB:Q769. This layered “level of description” approach enables both detailed analysis of individual figures and broader contextual study of their sources.

This data paper is prepared as part of the project 'Contextualization of Traditional Clothing: Reassessing the Connection Between Riga and Latgale' LU-BA-PG-2024/1-0023. The research is financed by the Recovery and Resilience Facility project "Internal and External Consolidation of the University of Latvia" (No.5.2.1.1.i.0/2/24/I/CFLA/007).