The Essex Lectures in Art History: Dr Keren Hammerschlag Lecture 2

The Essex Lectures in Art History are held each year. In June 2024 the lectures are titled 'The Chosen Race: Whiteness in Victorian Painting.'

Matrilineal Descent: Racial Inheritances in Victorian Paintings of Mothers and Their Children

This talk addresses the complex and fraught topics of descent and inheritance through an examination of Victorian paintings of mothers and their children, including Simeon Solomon’s Mother of Moses (1860) and William Blake Richmond’s The Slave (c.1865). Through the representation of relatives that resemble each other and others who do not—‘Looking alike, looking unlike,’ to quote Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby—the challenges involved in drawing racial lineages are given visual form. Also in this talk I engage with the complex literature on racial ‘passing’ and racial ‘hybridity,’ noting the degree to which Victorian race scientists were preoccupied with inter-racial unions and the products of those unions, sometimes described as beautiful but more often described as monstrous, degraded, deficient and sterile. Finally, the talk concludes with a focused discussion of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Beloved (1865-6). In addition to the fair-skinned bride and racially diverse bridesmaids, Rossetti included in The Beloved a depiction of a Black child. By speculating on the relationship of the child to other figures inside and outside the frame, I find traces of the trauma of forced removal of ‘mixed-race’ children from their mothers, which was practiced under both American slavery and British colonialism.

Keren Rosa Hammerschlag is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Art History and Art Theory at Australian National University in Canberra. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century British art and visual culture, and the relationship between art and medicine during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. In 2015 she published her first book, Frederic Leighton: Death, Mortality, Resurrection, with Ashgate. She has articles in Art Bulletin, Social History of Medicine, British Art Studies, Burlington Magazine, Victorian Studies and Medical Humanities. In 2021 she was awarded a four-year ANU Futures Scheme grant to develop the Visual Medical Humanities at the ANU. Her recently completed book manuscript is entitled The Chosen Race: Whiteness in Victorian Painting.

Each lecture is one hour, followed by a 45-minute Q&A session.

To register for the event please contact phaispg@essex.ac.uk