Phyllis Johnson, a prostitute with her name and price. Etching by a follower of Wenceslaus Hollar, 180- (?).

A portrait of one Phyllis Johnson, supposedly a prostitute who charged 1 crown for her services in the London of Charles II (ruled 1660-1685). The print is one of ten which seem to have been created in a later period also notorious for libertinage, the period of, and preceding the Regency of George Prince of Wales (1811-1820). Some of them appear to be copied from etchings by Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-1677), a Bohemian printmaker who worked in England. By invoking the promiscuous world contemporary with the diarist Samuel Pepys, the founding of the Royal Society, and the paintings of Lely in the mid seventeenth century, publishers and print-buyers could legitimise equally free conduct in their own, later times