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.