Making up Race: Whiteness, Pinkness, and Pompadour
Abstract
This essay reinterprets François Boucher’s portrait of Madame de Pompadour at her toilette by asking what it meant, in mid-eighteenth-century France, to paint oneself pink. Situating the work within the rise of Atlantic slavery and the global cosmetics trade, I examine the multiple meanings that accrued to artificially enhanced white and pink skin. Placing the portrait in dialogue with a contemporary harem scene also commissioned by Pompadour, the essay concludes with a discussion of how white skin emerged as a staged and commercially mediated sign of identity at the intersection of gender, class mobility, and empire.