Discriminating Taste: Skin Color and Connoisseurship in Eighteenth-Century France
Abstract
This essay examines Maurice-Quentin de La Tour’s 1741 pastel of a Black man in relation to contemporary debates about skin color, anatomy, and human difference. Rather than treating the work as a straightforward contribution to racial theory, I suggest that the portrait appealed to connoisseurs by offering the sensation of empirical knowledge, inviting viewers to scrutinize painted skin as both physiological specimen and artistic artifice. By reconstructing the habits of eighteenth-century close looking, the study ultimately questions the epistemological authority often granted to visual evidence, past and present