Chosen Race - Troubling Whiteness in Victorian Painting

From the Realist canvases of the Pre-Raphaelites to the Aesthetic experiments of James McNeill Whistler, The Chosen Race confronts the complex negotiations of whiteness that played out across British art of the nineteenth century. Examining the representation of racial supremacy, difference, and indeterminacy in paintings produced in England during the reign of Queen Victoria, Keren Rosa Hammerschlag explores the many ways Victorian painters engaged with racial ideas at the height of British imperial dominance. While at times these painters reinforced racial hierarchies, at other times they problematized them, revealing race to be a fundamentally unstable organizing principle by which to build an empire and classify its subjects.

About the author

Keren Rosa Hammerschlag is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Curatorship at the Australian National University in Canberra and author of Frederic Leighton: Death, Mortality, Resurrection.

Product details

• Authors: Dr. Keren Rosa Hammerschlag, Keren Rosa Hammerschlag
• Publisher: University Of California Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 24.02.2026
• EAN: 9780520420953
• ISBN: 978-0-520-42095-3
• No. of pages: 276
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Art history; Ethnic Studies, HISTORY / Social History, ART / Subjects & Themes / Human Figure, History of art / art & design styles, History of Art, Individual artists, art monographs, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Discrimination, Human figures depicted in art, Ethnic studies / Ethnicity, ART / European / General, ART / History / 19th Century, Human figures depicted in the arts