The YCBA, in partnership with Compton Verney, will host a symposium to increase understanding of the painting “Two Women Wearing Cosmetic Patches.” Topics include the painting’s provenance, attribution, and future display; the cloth trade in seventeenth-century England, Africa, and India; and evolving perceptions of beauty standards, including a keynote conversation focusing on cosmetic patches.
The middle decades of the seventeenth century in Britain were characterized by radical political, religious, and social change. In this period, an unknown artist created a remarkable painting that spoke to fears and anxieties crystallizing around a perceived increase in moral laxity, gender transgression, and the insidious influence of foreigners. The painting depicts two women side by side, each wearing a conspicuous array of beauty patches. The woman on the left reprimands her companion with the words “I black with white bespott: y[o]u white w[i]th blacke this Evill / proceeds from thy proud hart, then take her: Devill.” Text and image combine to inveigh against the sins of pride, vanity, and worldly excess. The painting reminds viewers that sinful behavior leads to the devil and exhorts them to seek salvation.
Compton Verney Art Gallery and Park in Warwickshire, England, has loaned the painting to the YCBA for conservation treatment and inclusion in the museum’s ongoing technical study of the theory and practice of painting skin tones. It will be on view at the Yale University Art Gallery from August 20 through September 30, 2024, before returning to Compton Verney.
Download a map showing the location of this painting on view at the Yale University Art Gallery here.
The symposium will be held at Hastings Hall, Yale School of Architecture, and online on September 27, 2024.
For more information, please email jemma.field@yale.edu.
Register
Registration is recommended but not required to participate. Please register for online and in-person attendance for this event here. A link to livestream the program, and more information about joining us in person will be shared at a later date.
Schedule
9:20–9:30 am
Welcome
Jemma Field, Associate Director of Research, YCBA, and Oli McCall, Senior Curator, Compton Verney Art Gallery and Park
9:30–9:50 am
Opening Talk — A Painter for a Puritan Picture?
Edward Town, Assistant Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, YCBA
This opening talk will provide an account of the recent history of the painting Two Women Wearing Cosmetic Patches (ca. 1655) and the research partnership between the YCBA and Compton Verney. It will present new findings about the painting’s early history and its attribution, set within the context of artistic production during the Interregnum.
9:50–11:05 am
Panel I — Women, Dress, and Morality
Chair: Elizabeth Cleland, Curator of European Paintings and Sculpture, Metropolitan Museum of Art
This session will consider visual and textual ideals of female beauty and behavior in seventeenth-century England. Topics of discussion include the construction of “otherness,” the political and gendered value of clothing, and contemporary desires to increase control over women’s bodies and lives.
Ad-dressing Conventions: Clothing, Gender, and Race in “Two Women Wearing Cosmetic Patches”
Jennifer Wu, Adjunct Professorial Lecturer, American University
Striped Cloth: Morality, Politics, and Gender in Interregnum England
Jemma Field, Associate Director of Research, YCBA
Beauty Beyond Borders? English Perceptions of “Barbarous” Beauty in the Seventeenth Century
Haijiao Wang, PhD student, University of Warwick
11:05 am – 12:20 pm
Panel II — Bodies and Voices
Chair: Patricia Fumerton, Distinguished Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara
This session interrogates female beauty standards, gender roles, and the concept of “otherness.” Drawing on an array of contemporary evidence—including emblems, anti-cosmetic polemics, travel narratives, pamphlets, and sermons— the speakers will look to further our understanding of the categories of desire, the racialization of beauty, and the development of national identities.
“All your most excellent thoughts can desire”: The Transformation and Consumption of Bodies in Early Modern England
Todd Simmons, PhD student, Lehigh University
Body Language: Reading Text and Image in “Two Women Wearing Cosmetic Patches”
Jane Partner, Fellow and College Associate Professor, Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge
Patches, Paint, and Proto-Dermatology: The Moral Medicalization of Cosmetics in John Bulwer’s “Anthropometamorphosis” (1653) and John Gauden’s “A Discourse of Auxiliary Beauty (1656)”
Katherine Aske, Lecturer, Edinburgh Napier University
12:20–2 pm
Lunch break
2–3:30 pm
Keynote — Cosmetics and Cultures of Beauty
Chair: Erin Griffey, Associate Professor, University of Auckland
This keynote brings together experts on seventeenth-century beauty cultures to discuss the complexities of patching. The discussants will consider the performative aspects of the painting, including the dialogue between the subjects and the imagined viewer, as well as the overall image of adornment. Patching is then discussed from a variety of angles that include its material properties, cost, patterns of usage, and place in moral and social commentaries, to consider contemporary beauty ideals, how early moderns understood the skin, how they treated skin conditions, and how they read appearances as an index of character, physical health, and spiritual virtue.
Jill Burke, Chair of Renaissance Visual and Material Cultures, University of Edinburgh
Evelyn Welch, Vice-Chancellor and President, University of Bristol
3:30–3:45 pm
Comfort break
3:45–4:15 pm
Closing Discussion — Exhibiting the Painting
Chair: Edward Town, Assistant Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, YCBA
The closing discussion will consider how to frame Two Women Wearing Cosmetic Patches in the future, plans for presenting the painting in the women’s library at Compton Verney, and reflections on takeaways from the day’s papers and conversations.
Oli McCall, Senior Curator, Compton Verney Art Gallery and Park
Jane Simpkiss, Curator, Compton Verney Art Gallery and Park
