A highly talked about painting will remain in the UK following a temporary stop to prevent it from leaving the country.
The painting — which was created by an unknown artist — depicts the portraits of a Black woman and a white woman.
The women appear to be companions of some type — with the duo wearing complimenting clothing, hair styles, and jewelry.
The work is titled Allegorical Painting of Two Ladies, and is part of the English school dating to about 1650. It is believed to be a commentary on beauty trends of the time — seeing that the women are shown wearing beauty patches regularly worn in the 17th century to cover blemishes or signs of disease.
Seeing that the Black woman and white woman are depicted as equals makes the painting an important tool to study race and gender in 17th century Britain.
The image is an oil on canvas painting. Scholars first became aware of the painting when it sold at an auction from the estate of the sixth Lord Kenyon in Shropshire in 2021. A temporary stop was then placed on the painting’s departure to make time for a UK institution to acquire it.
It was acquired by Compton Verney. The Yale Centre for British Art at Yale University will lead its conservation and study, with the piece then expected to go on public display sometime in 2024.
“The painting fits so interestingly with our collections,” said Geraldine Collinge, Compton Verney CEO, in a statement. “We’ve got portraits and folk art, where we’re thinking about different ways of showing people.”
“For us, it opens up a conversation about who’s in portraits and why certain people aren’t in portraits,” she added “We don’t know who the women were. The fact that it’s two women – one is black, one is white – is particularly interesting for us now and they were stories that were deliberately not told.”