Discriminating Taste: Skin Color and Connoisseurship in Eighteenth-Century France

Abstract

Focusing on Maurice-Quentin de La Tour’s 1741 pastel of a Black man, this essay considers the relationship between eighteenth-century connoisseurship and the study of dermal difference. Rather than treating the pastel 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 essay examines the different forms of epistemological authority granted to visual evidence of human difference.