In the Tate Britain gallery half of the building is filled with old 1800’s era portrait and landscape paintings which I barely glanced at probably because I’m a modern day image slob able to indulge in images and videos becoming bored with the tangible reality in such an image-saturated world I desire more abstract, surreal or material driven work although I was captivated by the wood carved golden frames of the paintings.

My eye was struck by the most unsettling painting I’ve ever come across. The painting is of two identical women in a bed holding identical babies, at first, I thought it was a single painting and a comparison of maybe a lost original. On closer inspection, the women and babies have subtle differences in their clothing detail and very slightly different faces but with the same haunting gaze on the babies and women’s faces and awkwardly posing uncomfortably in a shared bed.

The inscription on it makes the painting more unnerving as it says ‘’two ladies of Cholmondeley family, who were born the same day, married the same day, and brought to bed [gave birth] the same day’’. Also, the artist of the piece is unknown which just furthers the strangeness of the piece, the artist was probably executed after completion or their sole was consumed by either the infants or their mothers.