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Two Veiled Young Women, probably Lilla Amnani and Her Sister
Richard Cosway (British, 1742–1821)
1786
- Medium
- graphite, watercolor, red chalk on paper
- Classification
- Drawing
- Dimensions
- Matted: 38.1 x 29.7 cm (15 x 11 11/16 in.); Sheet: 33 x 25.7 cm (13 x 10 1/8 in.)
- Culture
- England
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Drawings
- Credit line
- Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Richard Cosway was a prolific painter in London, most well-known for his portrait miniatures and drawings, which he made both on commission and as personal exercises or mementos. This drawing features two women who may be fantasized versions of the two wives of Sidi Hadji Abdurrahman Adja, a Tripolitan ambassador who visited London in 1786. A published account of the ambassador’s home life circulated around this time. Cosway may have invented the ladies as a form of novelistic intrigue when he made a drawing featuring the ambassador.
