Global exploration and the dissemination through art of scenes representing the world beyond Europe
were in many respects illustrations of the Enlightenment’s search for knowledge. Documentary studies of
hitherto unfamiliar peoples and lands contributed to the contemporary thrust toward progress. However,
the exoticization, or idealization of these landscapes and peoples. It imposed western visual schemata on
“other,” different lands. Dominant visual tropes of blackness also often demonized or diminished “other”
peoples. The discourses of empire stalled the debates on rights and equalities stimulated by the
Enlightenment. Eighteenthcentury colonial art in Europe often embodied the excitement, nervousness
and moral myopia of a public confronted with increasingly frequent encounters with the unknown.
Further Reading
Bindman, David and Henry Louis Gates Jr (eds). 2011. The Image of the Black in Western Art vol. III
Part 3 “From the ‘Age of Discovery’ to the Age of Abolition: The Eighteenth century.” Cambridge, MA,
and London: The Belknap Press. A groundbreaking introduction to the representation in eighteenth
century western art of black peoples.
Brewer, John. 1997. The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century.
London: Harper Collins. An excellent introduction to eighteenthcentury English art and its publics.
Craske, Matthew. 1997. Art in Europe 1700–1830. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. An
excellent survey of the complex relationships between eighteenthcentury and early nineteenthcentury
European art and wider developments in politics, urbanization and economics.
Crow, Thomas E. 1985. Painters and Public Life in EighteenthCentury France . New Haven, CT, and
London: Yale University Press. An excellent study of the relationship between eighteenthcentury French
art and increasingly politicized notions of the “public.” The final chapter focuses on David.
Guest, Harriet. 2007. Empire, Barbarism, and Civilisation: James Cook, Wlliam Hodges, and the
Return to the Pacific. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Quilley, Geoff and Kay Dian Kriz (eds). 2003. An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic
World, 1660–1830. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Includes useful studies on colonial
identities.
Solkin, David. 1992. Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth
Century England. A useful study of new notions of the “public” in relation to developments in British art.
Smith, Bernard. 1985. European Vision and the South Pacific. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale
University Press.