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

Join the Manton Centre for a lecture from Keren Hammerschlag: A Matrilineal Descent: Racial Inheritances in Victorian Paintings of Mothers and Their Children

Babies and children were a preoccupation among Victorian artists, biologists and anthropologists concerned with the infancy of humanity and the future of the human species. This was in part because the ‘offspring’ of inter-racial unions—their fertility, but also their intelligence, biology and physiognomy—were thought to hold the answer to the question of whether the races were descended from a common origin and were one species (monogenism) or constituted entirely different species (polygenism). In this talk, which is taken from Keren Hammerschlag’s recently published book, The Chosen Race: Troubling Whiteness in Victorian Painting (University of California Press), she addresses the fraught topics of descent and inheritance through an examination of Victorian paintings of mothers and their children, with particular attention paid to depictions of infants who look different from their mothers. These complex representations of matrilineal descent are revealing of the challenges involved in identifying and portraying racial lineages, and undermine systems of racial classification based on skin, hair and eye colour. A case in point is Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Beloved (1865-6), a highly racialised illustration of the Hebrew Bible’s Song of Songs and Psalm 45. 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, Hammerschlag finds traces of the trauma of forced removal of ‘mixed-race’ children from their mothers, which was practiced under both American slavery and British colonialism.

This event is organised by Professor Steve Edwards, Manton Professor of British Art and Director of the Manton Centre for British Art, The Courtauld.