The artworks are rare and invaluable because of many reasons. Some artworks are more priceless and treasured than others because of their historical significance and employing scope with time and space. Some works may be preserved as a nation’s treasure, not allowed to carry outside the country’s border.
The British government declared ‘the allegorical Painting of Two Ladies, English School’ a ‘nation asset’ and imposed an export ban to protect that work of art from ‘going abroad’. This 17the century painting assumed two school girls, one black and one white, sitting side-by-side as equals but depicted differently.
It is rare to depict two women (one black and one white) on a single canvas at that time, and they are not children but adults. This painting invited debate about race, gender and many other layers of topics at that time.
African slavery in England has many century histories and has been rooted in England since at least 1563. This is the year one brings the slave for trade, according to the documented slave trade. The slave trade doesn’t ban in England until 1772; according to agencies, black people lived a more human life in England than in Caribbean plantations, but they were not treated as fully human. That is the point of this painting becoming rarest and invaluable. Colour discrimination treats black people as low and usually depicts them as the same in the artwork. Then why, in this painting, are black adults sitting as equal to white? How can that happen in the middle of this apartheid?
At first glimpse, they are buddies with matching dresses, cosmetics, hairstyles and jewellery and don’t consider black women as actual sitters depicting white women. Critics believe this painting depicts the time school culture in England. But how those ladies are portrayed, this way is entirely unusual. They carry strange markings on their faces because of the use of beauty patches, staking causing the wrath of God. Part of the sense of the patches was to disguise flaws or gestures of illness. That’s why perhaps the white sitter wears black patches of varied styles, and the black sitter has white ones. That is recognizable for the typical audience, and practice goes back to Roman period England. ‘The moralistic painting condemns the women’s vanity, as an inscription above their heads refers to the use of patches as a sin of pride, as written in the Artnet.
The presentation of the Black woman as an adult who is not in a position of subservience but instead wears a similar style dress to her companion was highly unusual at this time. The painting will, therefore, also be an invaluable document for the study of race and gender in 17th-century England, write Jo Lawson-Tancred in Artnet.
This painting was unknown to the scholars before the auction held in a small city which fetched more than 220,000 Euro, ten times more than expected. After the controversy, now these two ladies will examine to understand the complex narratives.
Credit: Artnet.com
Krispin Joseph PX, a poet and journalist, completed an MFA in art history and visual studies at the University of Hyderabad.
