Casta Paintings

Casta paintings are remarkable. These eighteenth-century paintings from Mexico and Peru depict mixed-race families, sometimes in intimate domestic settings. There is nothing else quite like them.

‘The Pleasures of Taxonomy: Casta Paintings, Classification and Colonialism’ situates these paintings in the sentimental world of the colonial romance, as well as in the debates about human nature and mankind that typified eighteenth-century enlightened science. I’ve also used casta paintings to study clothing and its connections to ethnicity.

In 2024 the Art Bulletin published the first scholarly analysis of the remarkable set of casta paintings found by Tara Munroe at the Leicester Museums and Art Gallery in 2010, which I wrote together with  Susan Deans-Smith of the University of Texas at Austin: ‘“Spanish” Casta Paintings in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Art Bulletin 106:2 (2024), 65-91.