Compton Verney’s new painted women are extra about vice than advantage – Apollo Journal
Final month, a lately rediscovered work by an unknown artist, Allegorical Portray of Two Girls (c. 1650), was bought by Compton Verney in Warwickshire. Its acquisition got here after the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Artwork and Objects of Cultural Curiosity judged the portray to have ‘excellent significance’ for research of race and gender in Seventeenth-century Britain and put in place a short lived ban on its being exported. The information was greeted with enthusiasm throughout the media, which hailed the obvious equality of the sitters. However we ought to be cautious of assuming that that is a completely constructive parity: it is a moralising picture that speaks of sin, of self-importance, of wantonness.
The portray presents two expensively-dressed ladies facet by facet, pearls round their necks and hair coiffed within the newest fashions. They’re mirror pictures of one another. One is a lady of color; the opposite is white. The girl of color wags her finger at her counterpart in a gesture each warning and playful. Above her head reads an inscription: ‘I black with white bespott y white with blacke this evil proceeds from thy proud hart then take her: Devill.’
These should not portraits of actual folks. As an alternative, each ladies are allegories of self-importance, their faces ‘bespott’ with patches formed like stars and crescent moons. Manufactured from imported silk, velvet or Spanish leather-based, and sometimes closely perfumed with unique fragrances, magnificence patches grew to become fashionable in the beginning of the Seventeenth century and had been used nicely into the 18th century. Such patches originated in France, the place they had been satirically nicknamed mooches (flies). Their placement symbolised numerous meanings: on the nook of your eye represented ‘ardour’, for example, whereas a patch on the centre of the brow meant you had been ‘majestic’.
Over time, these patches grew to become extra elaborate. The Gentlewoman’s Companion (1675) describes patches ‘lower out into little Moons, Suns, Stars, Castles, Birds, Beasts, and Fishes of all kinds, in order that their Faces could also be correctly termed a Panorama of residing Creatures’. A picture in a 1650 tract reveals a lady with a complete carriage and horses on her brow.
Magnificence patches – together with one formed as a carriage and horses – as seen in Anthropometamorphosis: Man Rework’d, or the Synthetic Changling (1650), John Bulwer. Picture: Wellcome Assortment
They had been typically known as ‘the mark of Venus’, named after the goddess whose magnificence was accentuated by a single blemish: a black facial mole that introduced the perfection of her options into higher reduction. For girls emulating the goddess, such patches might additionally cover pimples or scars. This use made patches objects of concern for Puritan Englishmen. Dissembling was devilish behaviour, and ladies who sought to beautify themselves had been foul temptresses. God had created you ‘warts and all’, as Cromwell put it; to ‘appropriate’ your options was thus a form of blasphemy. That patches had been a French trend made them much more threatening: overseas, Catholic and carrying associations of syphilis, the ‘French pox’, which left facial lesions that they may cover.
Although most readily related to ladies of the night time, the style was fashionable in all ranks of society. Its adherents included noblemen: when Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington, was wounded within the civil struggle, he took to carrying a big black patch over an ugly scar on his nostril. Shakespeare’s All’s Properly That Ends Properly (1623) has Bertram return from struggle ‘with a patch of / velvet on’s face: whether or not there be a scar beneath’t or no, the velvet is aware of’. The patch might cowl all method of sins.
Allegorical Portray of Two Girls (element; c. 1650), unknown artist. Picture: Compton Verney
But it surely was ladies who got here beneath assault for carrying patches. In 1650, the approximate date of the Allegorical Portray, Parliament introduced forth an act to ban ‘the vice of portray and carrying black patches, and conceited gown of ladies’. The invoice was rejected, however its enforcers had been a vocal minority. It was from this context that the portray emerged. In an echo of the portray’s inscription, a 1662 tract titled A Surprise of Wonders, of a Metamorphosis of Honest Faces voluntarily reworked into foul Visages, or an Invective towards black-spotted Faces, assured readers that:
Hell gate is open day and night time
For akin to in black-spots delight; If delight their faces noticed make,
For delight then hell their souls will take.
Black spots and patches within the face to sober ladies carry shame;
Lewd harlots by such spots are recognized.
There are additionally modern visible parallels. John Bulwer’s woodcut-illustrated guide Anthropometamorphosis: Man Rework’d: or, the Artificiall Changling (1650) claimed that ‘our women have these days entertained a vaine custome of recognizing their Faces […] that is as odious and as senselesse an affectation as ever was utilized by any Barbarous Nation on the earth’; the accompanying picture has placing similarities to our portray. However the place the accompanying illustration depicts the black girl with hideous racial stereotyping and positions her subserviently beneath her white counterpart, the ladies on this portray look out at us as equals – equal top, equal gown, equal gazes – which is surprising in a portray from this era. This implies that it was not an excessive amount of of a leap for folks in 1650s England to think about an expensively dressed girl of color on the identical footing as a white girl.
Allegorical Portray of Two Girls (c. 1650), unknown artist. Picture: Compton Verney
However we must always tread fastidiously earlier than assuming that that is an altogether constructive depiction of equality: the ladies are embodiments of self-importance and sin, poised to be taken by the Satan. These ladies are embracing the ‘overseas’, each by way of the color of their pores and skin and their embrace of the French trend for patching.
There may be a lot extra to be found. In 1949, the portray’s then-owner Lord Tyrell-Kenyon described it as ‘a curious image which has hung right here for a few years, however of which I do know of no actual clarification’. The work will probably be restored and researched on the Yale Heart for British Artwork earlier than occurring show at Compton Verney. Will probably be fascinating to look at as its secrets and techniques are revealed.