Two Women Wearing Cosmetic Patches: A Research Collaboration

In fall 2024, the painting Two Ladies Wearing Cosmetic Patches was on loan to the Yale Center for British Art from Compton Verney Art Gallery and Park, Warwickshire, UK, for treatment and a collaborative research project. In this video, Jessica David, Jemma Field, and Edward Town discuss how this painting was made and consider questions of authorship and patronage. 

The middle decades of the seventeenth century in Britain were characterized by radical political, religious, and social change. In this period, an artist, now identified as Jerome Hesketh, created an unusual 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. 

A symposium was jointly held with Compton Verney at Yale to increase understanding of the painting. 

Jessica David is Head of Paintings Conservation at the Yale Center for British Art. Her recent research has focused on the artistic practices, materials, and influence of immigrant painters in Britain, and the rendering of diverse complexions in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century British painting. She is currently developing a technical catalog on Tudor and early Stuart portraits in support of a forthcoming exhibition on Elizabethan portraiture at the museum. She undertook the conservation of Two Women Wearing Cosmetic Patches and conducted the technical analysis of the painting with Richard Hark of Yale's Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage.

Jemma Field is Associate Director of Research at the Yale Center for British Art. She oversees the Residential Scholars program and Yale in London, and she is a leading presence in the organization of the YCBA’s symposia and study days, among other scholarly outputs. Her current research project examines the wardrobe goods of King Charles I, and she is co-editing a special issue of British Art Studies focusing on the visual and material culture of the Jacobean period. She has published articles in Costume, Northern Studies, The Court Historian, and Women’s History Review. Her first monograph, centered on Anna of Denmark, was published by Manchester University Press in 2020.

Lucia Olubunmi R. Momoh is a writer, curator, and art historian completing a duo-PhD in African American studies and art history from Yale University. She researches Black portraiture and exhibitions in relation to constructs of race, gender, and national identity and maintains an independent art writing and curatorial practice. 

Edward Town is Assistant Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art. His research focuses on the production of art in the early modern period and appears in numerous articles on this subject. He was an editor and contributor to Painting in Britain 1500–1630 (British Academy, 2015) and Marking Time: Objects, People, and Their Lives, 1500–1800 (Yale University Press, 2020).