Reynolds was among those prepared to concede that the association of white skin with beauty was merely
customary, and that the link between skin color and beauty was relative rather than absolute:
...it is custom alone determines our preference of the colour of the Europeans to the Aethiopians; and
they, for the same reason, prefer their own colour to ours. I suppose no body will doubt, if one of their
painters were to paint the goddess of beauty, but that he would represent her black, with thick lips, flat
nose, and woolly hair; and, it seems to me, he would act very unnaturally if he did not; for by what
criterion will any one dispute the propriety of his idea?
(From The Idler, 1759, cited in Bindman, with contributions from Boucher and Weston, 2011, 6)He nevertheless perpetuated in his art the “custom” of white preference. The aesthetic of the sublime
associated blackness and darkness with terror; Buffon conceived of black skin as white skin ruined by the
sun; and there were frequent metaphorical associations between blackness, bile (melancholy) and biblical
curses. Black skin signified within a structure of thought that assumed white skin as the norm. The
naturalist Pieter Camper (1722–1789) used skull measurements to compare racial types and to suggest
degrees of degradation from the “ideal” profile offered by the Apollo Belvedere, although there was
generally much less pseudoscience of this kind than in the following century. Diderot came down
categorically on the side of white skin: “I believe that negroes are less beautiful to themselves than white
to negroes and to other whites” (Salon de 1767, cited in Bindman, with contributions from Boucher and
Weston, 2011, 7–9; and see Bindman, Boucher and Weston, 2011b, 115–117). Theories of beauty were,
for much of the eighteenth century, connected with those of morality (see Chapter 5). Global anxieties
about race were evident in and exacerbated by colonial relations; for example, in the casta paintings of
New Spain (present day Mexico), a new eighteenthcentury genre that recorded through individual and
group figure studies the different racial types and lineages evident in Mexico at the time, arising from
intermarriage between colonial Spanish, South American Indian and other races. These paintings
documented the perceived degrees of divergence of such types from “pure” Spanishness (Ford, Cummins,
McCrea and Weston, 2011, 246–59).
Western visual representations of blacks were characterized, in the eighteenth century, by stereotype and
fiction. Blacks were seen variously as “noble” (due to their association with more “primitive” and
therefore more “innocent” lifestyles), evil or savage. Negative associations were made with the
diabolical, the primeval, witchcraft, paganism, animal lust, unnatural sexual desire (Othello was seen to
embody this particular characteristic), idolatry, religious enthusiasm, nakedness, dishonesty, heavy
drinking and a lack of modesty. These characteristics marked out blacks as “other” to the European
Enlightenment ideal in a way that would fail to satisfy more recent notions of racial and cultural relativity
(Bindman and Gates, 2011, xiv). It has been argued that Hogarth played on these negative stereotypical
representations and risked misinterpretation by his contemporaries, some of whom did not understand that
black figures were often used in his art as a means of exposing the vices, prejudices and social climbing
of their white masters (Dabydeen, 1985, 130–131).
By contrast, black figures were often imagined as representing the ideal, uncorrupted human being. The
association of blacks with goodness, innocence, antique wisdom and heroism is now referred to as the
“noble savage” tradition, and derived from earlier writers, many inspired by overseas exploration, such
as Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) and John Dryden (1631–1700); and from Rousseau’s concept of the
“good savage,” as expounded in his Discourse on Inequality. Rousseau didn’t use the term “noble
savage” itself. The “noble savage” was associated with the simple huntergatherer stage of humankind’s
development, before corrupt motives and behavior became widespread. The type had been made familiar
in the novel Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave: A True History (1688) by Aphra Behn (1640?–1689), in