Please note that this focus exhibition is scheduled to end in November 2026. Please refer to the website of Compton Verney to for the exact closing date.
Two Women Wearing Cosmetic Patches (ca. 1655) will be on display in the Women’s Library at Compton Verney from 21 November 2024. When this painting appeared at auction in the UK, it seized the attention of the art world. A double portrait of a Black woman and a white woman, apparently presented as companions and equals is highly unusual from this period.
The Yale Center for British Art successfully bid for the painting at auction and applied for a license to export it from the UK to the United States after which it was purchased by Compton Verney.
Anonymous, Two Women Wearing Cosmetic Patches, ca. 1650
Compton Verney Art Gallery and Park, Warwickshire
The painting depicts a Black woman and a white woman side by side, arms touching. Their fashionable appearance dates the work to the 1650s. Both women wear low, scooped necklines that just skim the shoulders; short, bulbous sleeves that reveal the wrists and part of the forearms; ringleted hair worn half-up with curls that graze the shoulders and frame the face; and an array of figurative cosmetic patches across their faces. The Black woman raises her hand and admonishes her companion through a painted inscription: “I black with white bespott: y[o]u white w[i]th blacke this Evill: / proceeds from thy proud hart: then take her: Devill:”
The painting is the centerpiece of a display that reveals insights to attitudes towards morality and race. Displayed alongside the painting will be John Bulwer’s famous book Anthrometamorphosis: the man transform’d or, the artificiall changeling (1653) and Francis Hawkin’s A discourse upon some innovations of habits and dressings against powdring of hair, Naked-Breasts, Black Spots and other unseemly Customes (1653) on loan from Trinity College, Cambridge. Both books bear illustrations that are similar to the painting and give context to the potential reason for the paintings creation.
For more information see this essay by curator Jane Simpkiss on the website of Compton Verney.