The colour white has long had a deep-rooted, ideological function in art and visual culture. From the seventeenth century onwards, the economic exploitation of peoples via the transatlantic slave trade relied heavily on notions of racial difference, whereby we see the first attempts to explain racial difference and white superiority by so-called science. The invention of the ‘white race’ helped to facilitate and even justify the exploitation of black labourers. Can we therefore think of whiteness in colonial art as more than simply an aesthetic choice, but rather, a political one? In Western art, white skin can be more than just skin-deep: there are wider historical, sociological and anthropological assumptions at play with regards to lightness and darkness of skin complexion. To go further, this ideology also takes a gendered turn; we also start to see a valorisation of female whiteness in particular, which conflates white skin with beauty, morality and virtue. However, far from being relegated to history, whiteness as we know it today is a legacy of colonialism, and these dangerous ideologies continue to exist in various forms.

This session will explore the construction of whiteness in art history, and in particular, white femininity. Looking firstly at whitewashing in Western art (where historically, women who would have been brown or black are portrayed as white) it will go on to look closely at how portraits of white female sitters have been imbued with layers of ideology, such as notions of moral authority, innocence and even nationhood.

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