The chosen race: troubling whiteness in Victorian painting

Abstract

"From the Realist canvases of the Pre-Raphaelites to the Aesthetic experiments of James McNeill Whistler, The Chosen Race confronts the complex negotiations of whiteness that played out across British art of the nineteenth century. Examining the representation of racial supremacy, difference, and indeterminacy in paintings produced in England during the reign of Queen Victoria, Keren Rosa Hammerschlag explores the many ways Victorian painters engaged with racial ideas at the height of British imperial dominance. While at times these painters reinforced racial hierarchies, at other times they problematized them, revealing race to be a fundamentally unstable organizing principle by which to build an empire and classify its subjects"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents

Introduction -- Indexing whiteness : racial mixing in paintings of modern Britain -- Original sin : Jews versus Anglo-Saxons in Victorian history paintings -- Daughters of empire : matchmaking across racial lines in Edwin Long's Babylonian marriage market -- Matrilineal descent : racial inheritances in Victorian paintings of mothers and their children -- White for white's sake : Whistler, Sargent, and the production of whiteness -- Conclusion.