“Two Women Wearing Cosmetic Patches”: A Research Collaboration

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:”

Little known prior to 2021, when it appeared at auction in the UK, the painting seized the attention of the art world, who read this work as a double portrait of a Black woman and a white woman, presented as “companions and equals.” This portrayal was highly unusual, since Western European paintings of this period typically show individuals of African heritage in positions of subservience.  

The YCBA successfully bid for the painting at auction and applied for a license to export it from the UK to the United States. The case was referred to the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest, a group of art historians and legal experts who ruled that “this extremely rare and fascinating painting” was of “outstanding significance to the study of race and gender in the 17th century,” and should therefore remain in the UK. The painting was subsequently purchased by Compton Verney. 

In order to learn more about this intriguing painting, Compton Verney and the YCBA decided to partner on a research project that combined conservation treatment, technical study, and art-historical inquiry. The YCBA team was led by Jessica David, Head of Paintings Conservation; Jemma Field, Associate Director of Research; and Edward Town, Assistant Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, with the support of Sarah Mead Leonard, Postdoctoral Research Associate. At Compton Verney, the project was led by Oli McCall, Senior Curator, and Jane Simpkiss, Curator. 

In early 2024, the painting arrived on temporary loan at the YCBA, where researchers have spent several years studying the theory and practices of painting skin tones in the early modern period, as well as working to identify and name people of color in historic British portraits. Previous studies include the group portrait Elihu Yale with his Family and an Enslaved Child (ca. 1719) and Joshua Reynolds’s double portrait Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington, and Marcus Richard Fitzroy Thomas (1782). Both of those paintings were examined by Jessica David and by Richard Hark, Conservation Scientist at Yale’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage.  

David performed several conservation treatments on Two Women Wearing Cosmetic Patches. She removed the old varnish and conducted minor structural work to significantly increase the legibility of the composition—particularly the details of the Black figure and the inscription—and to preserve it for future generations.  

Hark analyzed the painting, using macro X-ray florescence (XRF) scanning to create a map of the chemical elements present in the paint. This process helps identify which pigments the artist used and how they were distributed on the canvas. In this case, the mercury map showed that the artist used red vermillion for both women, and used it liberally for the Black woman. This is significant because it goes against both the prevailing artistic practices of the 1650s and the advice given in painting manuals of the time, in which red vermillion (a synthetic pigment) is consistently used for white figures and natural, earth pigments such as umber are used for painting Brown and Black figures.  

So why did the artist of Two Women Wearing Cosmetic Patches not use the latest techniques of the 1650s? This anomaly suggests the artist worked outside London. In the city, painting manuals that named specific pigments and dictated their uses were readily accessible. Moreover, previous technical studies at the YCBA showed that London artists working in this period—such as Peter Lely (1618–1680), whose large studio employed multiple artists—typically followed this advice. Two works in the YCBA collection demonstrate these practices: Lely’s Diana and her Nymphs at a Fountain (ca. 1648) and Bartholomew Dandridge’s A Young Girl with an Enslaved Servant and a Dog (ca. 1725). Similar technology was used to analyze another painting that depicts people with diverse skin tones, The Paston Treasure (ca. 1663, Norwich Castle Museum), which was the subject of an exhibition at the museum, and concluded that the unidentified artist used the same approach. 

For YCBA curator Edward Town, the unexpected use of pigment in Two Women Wearing Cosmetic Patches opened new avenues of inquiry to identify its unknown painter by encouraging him to consider artists outside London. Town’s initial research suggests Jerome Hesketh (active 1643–66) as a possible candidate. This artist spent the 1650s in the northwest counties of Lancashire, Cumbria, and Cheshire. Research on the authorship question is ongoing, but circumstantial evidence links Hesketh to members of the Kenyon family, who were likely the painting’s original owners. To learn more, watch this short film produced by the YCBA.

In addition to conducting conservation and technical analysis of the painting, the YCBA convened a symposium about the painting, held at Yale University on September 27, 2024. The event included a series of conversations and close-looking sessions with leading experts from Yale and beyond. The aim was to better understand how the painting functioned for its original patron and audience, to untangle its pictorial and textual registers, and to excavate further knowledge about attitudes and experiences in 1650s England. Conference papers argued that Two Women Wearing Cosmetic Patches is not a portrait of two individuals but a generalized image of fashionable womanhood, intended for moralizing effect. Understood in this light, it is not a vision of racial equality but a complicated, unsettling image that racializes customs and behaviors.  

Several scholars noted the close visual resemblance between Two Women Wearing Cosmetic Patches and woodcuts that appear in the 1653 edition of Anthropometamorphosis: the man transform’d or, the artificiall changeling by John Bulwer (1606–1656). In this racialized and racist book, Bulwer connected the fashionable practice of patching—pasting cutout fabric pieces of various shapes to the face—and other kinds of facial and bodily adornment to people in India, Asia, and the Americas. For Bulwer, a white Englishman, and many of his contemporaries, the art of face painting and the use of patches were foreign fashions used by non-Christian people of color in faraway lands, a corrupting contagion that threatened English values and identity. As Jemma Field’s symposium paper argued, this xenophobia similarly underwrites the painting, which associates patching with Blackness and tells viewers that white Englishwomen whose vanity compels them to adopt the practice will end up with the Devil. By extension, the painting insists, their vanity will blur the boundaries of race, nation, and religion, thereby destabilizing English society.

Following the symposium, the painting returned to Compton Verney, where it went on view in November 2024 and will remain on display for at least two years. Research into the painting continues, as scholars look to further their understanding of artists’ working practices, the didactic role of visual and material culture, and the myriad ways in which Englishmen and women of the 1650s grappled with a destabilized social order after the English Civil War. This research will also add to knowledge of how England’s expanding empire impacted cultural signifiers, and how artistic processes and pigment choices were manipulated to paint different skin tones.