In 2010, Tara Monroe, who was working at the Leicester Museum & Art Gallery, made the remarkable discovery of part of a set of paintings that have since been identified as Casta Paintings.
These paintings were recently the subject of a fascinating conference at the University of Leicester, with contributors including Ilona Katzew (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Curator and Dept. Head of Latin American Art), Dr Susan Deans-Smith (Department of History University of Texas at Austin), Michael Ohajuru (Cultural Historian & Senior Fellow of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies) and myself.
You can watch my lecture, ‘The Most Interesting and Valuable Productions Ever Publicly Exhibited’: Mexican Casta Paintings in 19th-century Britain’, as well as the full conference, on Youtube or below.
Photo credit: Leicester Museums and Galleries