More about The Cholmondeley Ladies

Shoshone

Contributor

In the long and storied career of "Anonymous," The Cholmondeley Ladies is one of the most unusual achievements.

Anonymous has built up somewhat of a notorious reputation, refusing to grant interviews, attend biennales, or pose for photographs. You would think that the Cholmondeley family of Cheshire, England, who pronounce their name "Chumley," would have some tips for us, but they seem to be either uninterested in the creator of Cholmondeley Ladies  or, like most people, completely without answers. Who are these two women, and who are these babies? Even the inscription, claiming their membership in the Cholmondeley family, dates from at least a century after the painting was made. Since then, the Tate has revived the painting from a beetle infestation, and it endures today.

The most likely answer, according to the dean of Cholmondeley Ladies studies, one John T. Hopkins, is that Mary Cholmondeley commissioned a portrait of her daughters, Mary and Lettice, by a member of the Chester Painters' Company in 1606. Hopkins has a few dozen pages worth of provenance facts, genealogy, and local history, but is still unable to prove his hypothesis outright. It doesn't help that someone donated this painting to the Tate about 350 years after "Anonymous" painted it.

One of the great joys, and challenges, of writing about art is that you have to face the unknown. One of the wonderful things about Sartle is the celebration of the opinionated, and opinion itself is a kind of doubling, a kind of dance between opposites, like this painting and Titian's Sacred and Profane Love, another work of double womanhood with lots of question marks around it. As soon as you make a statement, it often seems wrong, and you have to consider the fact that you may be wrong. Yet still, the anonymity of the painter and donor raises the possibility that "Anonymous" was a woman.

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Here is what Wikipedia says about The Cholmondeley Ladies


The Cholmondeley sisters and their swaddled babies. c.1600–1610

The Cholmondeley Ladies (pronounced /ˈtʃʌmli/ CHUM-lee) is an early-17th-century English oil painting depicting two women seated upright and side by side in bed, each holding a baby. Measuring 88.6 by 172.3 centimetres (34.9 in × 67.8 in), it was painted on four joined panels of oak, probably in the first decade of the 17th century. According to an inscription in gold lettering to the bottom left of the painting, it shows "Two Ladies of the Cholmondeley Family, Who were born the same day, Married the same day, And brought to Bed the same day."

At first sight, the two women and their two babies appear almost identical, each mother wearing similarly elaborate clothing decorated with lace and jewellery, each baby swaddled in a christening robe and held at a similar angle. On closer inspection, numerous details of the clothing, jewellery, and facial characteristics of the two pairs are seen to differ. The women could be sisters and possibly even twins but their differing eye colours demonstrate that they are not identical twins. The pose is not known to have been used in any other British painting, but was frequently seen in contemporary funerary art.

The artist is unknown, but the work is thought to have been painted near the Cholmondeley family's estates in Cheshire. It is painted on a predominantly white chalk ground, bound with animal glue size, and then primed with lead white and chalk bound with oil. Most of the painting was made using an additive technique, with areas of colours sketched out and then details and shading added in layers, but the faces were painted wet-in-wet. It was most recently cleaned and restored by the Tate in 1959, including restoration of areas of flaking paint. The painting was in the collection of Thomas Cholmondeley, the third son of Sir Hugh Cholmondeley and his wife Lady Mary Cholmondeley (née Holford), who was an ancestor of Baron Delamere. John T. Hopkins (1991) suggests that the portrait shows two daughters of Sir Hugh and Lady Mary Cholmondeley – Lettice, first wife of Sir Richard Grosvenor, 1st Baronet (and mother of Sir Richard Grosvenor, 2nd Baronet), and Mary Calveley (died 1616), wife of George Calveley.

It was presented to the Tate Gallery by an anonymous donor in 1955.

Check out the full Wikipedia article about The Cholmondeley Ladies