differences and anthropological distinctiveness. Art “publics” were increasingly aware of the colonial
territories their nations had established (see Introduction). Western artists in search of new markets
traveled to these territories and played an important role in satisfying domestic curiosity concerning
unfamiliar lands, peoples and customs. There were few artists permanently resident in colonial
territories, Jamaica and North America being exceptional in their ability to offer more secure incomes to
resident artists. Those artists who wished to paint colonial scenes from direct observation often led
temporarily itinerant lives. Many works were commissioned for British country houses, some of which
have now disappeared from sight: such paintings sometimes included visual references that might be read
as justifying the families’ means of wealth acquisition (Brown, 2013, 89–97; Longmore, 2013, 43–53).
Integral to these developments was a growing awareness of race, described at the time as “human
varieties.” Eighteenthcentury art and literature inspired by colonial enterprise brought their public new
opportunities to reflect on its own place and status in a global context and on issues of national identity.
Concepts of race evolved in a context of specific ideas on religion, science and aesthetics. The various
editions of the Systema Naturae (1735) by Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) conceived of four races
differentiated by continent and skin color (white European, black African, brown Asian and red
American), with exploration of the (Pacific) South Seas raising the possibility of a fifth. The work
reinforces nevertheless established Christian notions of the interrelatedness of all peoples, dispersed
after the Biblical Fall, and their common origins (“monogenesis”) in the Garden of Eden. The naturalist
GeorgesLouis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788), in his Natural History (Histoire naturelle,
1749–1804) saw different peoples as located on a spectrum, their precise place on this determined by
climate or environment rather than by predetermined or essentialist “racial” characteristics (Bindman,
2002, 17–21). In the realm of aesthetics, Winckelmann’s neoclassical, Greekinspired concept of ideal
beauty (see Chapter 1) depended on an “editing out” from the bodies of gods and men represented in art
of ethnically distinctive features. He saw distinctively Chinese or black facial features and skin colors as
offending classical notions of “symmetry.” He claimed the superiority of white skin lay in its capacity to
reflect light. While such statements were made in the name of aesthetic preference, they were succeeded
in the nineteenth century by attitudes to race characterized by wider prejudices (Potts, 1994, 160–162;
Bindman, 2002, 11, 13, 16, 15–16, 79–81).
A team of scholars, including David Bindman, Henry Louis Gates Jr, Helen Weston, Bruce Boucher and
Charles Ford, have recently explored these issues in depth. There were many positive or celebratory
visual representations of black subjects, yet eighteenthcentury representations of blacks and other native
peoples were deeply inflected by western cultural and national values. Implicit hierarchies of power,
social standing, political freedom, beauty, skin color and ethical characteristics were common in visual
images that included black figures, the term “black” being used here to refer to persons who appear to be
of African descent. In the eighteenth century the terms “negro,” “Moor” and “Ethiopian” (Greek for
“burned face”) were common (Bindman and Gates 2011, lx–x, xvi).
The stereotypical view was that the racial characteristics of this group were “thick lips, flat nose, and
woolly hair”. Very few Europeans distinguished between North African and subSaharan peoples or
other more localized ethnic groups. It was also common for artists to confuse black Africans with those
from the Caribbean – or even American Indians (Bindman, Kaplan and Weston, 2011, 196). Generalized
Africans or “blackamores” featured in European paintings, sculptures, porcelain, furniture (e.g.chair legs,
gueridons and vase supports), trade cards, maps and shop signs, where they evoked exotic luxury. They
often appeared as “jolly” servants, sailors, soldiers, musicians, beggars and streetsellers, or as
plantation workers, their subjection to contemporary colonial commerce often represented as benign
(Dabydeen, 1985, 17–20, 114; Bindman, Boucher and Weston, 2011a, 34–40; Bindman, Kaplan and
Weston, 2011, 172).