Wellcome uses cookies.

Read our policy
Wellcome Collection homepage
All
Stories
Images
Catalogue
Events

Stories

  • Article

Keeping death close

Scattering her father’s ashes, Lauren Entwistle found herself longing for something physical that proved he once was a living, breathing person. Here she reflects on the objects that help us to grieve and remember.

  • Book extract

Renaissance women and their killer cosmetics

In this extract from ‘How to be a Renaissance Woman’, Jill Burke delves into a complex world of beauty products, poison and patriarchy – and reveals the impossible contradictions of femininity faced by 16th-century women.

  • Article

Indian botanicals and heritage wars

Colonial botanical texts, as astonishingly beautiful as they are, may cast very dark shadows.

  • Article

The girl with no name

When a now anonymous teenager sold her tooth for transplant, she couldn’t have predicted that she’d end up at the heart of a troubling story about 18th-century beauty ideals.

All stories (69)

Images

  • Delightes for ladies, to adorne their persons, tables, closets, and distillatories: with beauties, banquets, perfumes and waters / [Sir Hugh Plat].
  • Two women at their toilet, a satyr looks on. Gouache painting by S.W. Kelly, 1937.
  • The new beauty-culture : an absolutely new way of beautifying the complexion... Pond's Extract Soap / Armour & Company.
  • Beauty: illustrated chiefly by an analysis and classification of beauty in women / Preceded by a critical view of the general hypotheses respecting beauty, by Hume, Hogarth, Burke, Knight, Alison, etc., and followed by a similar view of the hypotheses of beauty in sculpture and painting by Leonardo da Vinci, Winckelmann, Mengs, Bossi, etc. By Alexander Walker. Illustrated by drawings from life, by Henry Howard.
  • Mary Ray.
  • Abdeker, ou, L'art de conserver la beauté / [Anon].
  • Beauty: illustrated chiefly by an analysis and classification of beauty in women / Preceded by a critical view of the general hypotheses respecting beauty, by Hume, Hogarth, Burke, Knight, Alison, etc., and followed by a similar view of the hypotheses of beauty in sculpture and painting by Leonardo da Vinci, Winckelmann, Mengs, Bossi, etc. By Alexander Walker. Illustrated by drawings from life, by Henry Howard.
  • Beauty: illustrated chiefly by an analysis and classification of beauty in women / Preceded by a critical view of the general hypotheses respecting beauty, by Hume, Hogarth, Burke, Knight, Alison, etc., and followed by a similar view of the hypotheses of beauty in sculpture and painting by Leonardo da Vinci, Winckelmann, Mengs, Bossi, etc. By Alexander Walker. Illustrated by drawings from life, by Henry Howard.
  • Abdeker, ou, L'art de conserver la beauté / [Anon].
  • Three women at a wash-basin, on either side stand attendants. Gouache painting by S.W. Kelly, 1937.
All images (95)

Catalogue

All works (583)