Surface Matters: Skin Colour, Race and Materiality

Madeline Hewitson

An account of colour in the nineteenth century cannot omit the subject of skin colour, which dominated racial discourses during the period and whose potent legacies still shape our thinking about the visual markers of social difference. The idea that someone’s race can be described using the language of colour is manipulative and has a flattening effect. It reduces the infinite diversity of human beings to simplistic and, ultimately, symbolic shades: black, white, red, yellow. As the cultural historian Roger Bastide summarised: ‘Colours are not important in themselves as optical phenomena, but as bearers of a message.’227

The way artists portray skin colour is foundational to the history of figurative art. However, in the nineteenth century, the idea that race could be defined visually in colour terms took on a new significance with developments in the emerging field of anthropology. By the middle of the century, Victorian anthropologists were moving away from previous racial categorisation methods –developed during the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century – which were known as ‘types’ and based on physical features such as bone structure, hair texture or even cultural signifiers such as ethnic costume (fig. 2.4.1 – African Man in Costume WA1881.353.1).

In 1873, the French anatomist Charles-Phillipe Robin discovered melanin as the source of skin pigmentation in the human body. As a result of this discovery, anthropologists soon devised new methodologies to separate the races by quantifying the amount of pigment found in skin. In 1879, Paul Broca published the ‘Broca chart for determining eye colour and skin tone’. The chart measured skin tone, from lightest to darkest, using a structure which mirrored the neat tables found in publications on colour theory, or naturalist texts such as Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours (fig. 2.4.2 – Broca chart). These developments were concurrent with the invention of new synthetic pigments and dyes and, as such, realigned ideas of ‘natural’ colour away from vegetables and minerals and towards the human body.

[2.4.1]

Darwin’s revelations in The Descent of Man (1871) played a significant role in new racial discourses. Although he proposed that all men came from a single, common ancestor, he also believed that differences in skin colour were caused by sexual selection and that females expressed a preference for lighter-skinned males. The ‘survival of the fittest’ narrative was also misappropriated by Victorian eugenicists, including his nephew Thomas Galton, to argue that racial tensions were a natural part of human evolution. These ideas quickly filtered into popular culture through exhibition displays such the Ethnographic Courts at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham (fig. 2.4.3 - Ethnographic Courts at CPS). Visitors encountered plaster models of various non-European ethnic

[2.5.2]

When John Gibson’s Tinted Venus was displayed at the 1862 International Exhibition (fig. 2.5.1), it was presented in a polychrome temple specially designed by Owen Jones. The statue was set against a deep porphyry-coloured background, surrounded by ochre columns and surmounted by a blue pediment to match the tints used by the sculptor to highlight the hair, breast, lips and drapery of his sculpture (fig. 2.5.2).

In 1862, Jones’s reputation as one of the most active chromophiles of his time was already firmly established. A key figure in the design reform movement and celebrated author of The Grammar of Ornament (1856), the architect had repeatedly given colour pride of place in his designs and publications. The breakthrough in his public career as a colourist came with his decoration of the 1851 Crystal Palace. In an enthusiastic article entitled ‘The Harmony of Colours as Exemplified in the Exhibition’, Mary Philadelphia Merrifield, an expert who had made a name for herself by translating medieval treatises on colour, described Jones’s chromatic scheme in glowing terms. It reflected, she wrote, the new laws of colour contrast devised in 1839 by the director of the Gobelins Dye-Works, French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul.240 Although John Gregory Crace also referred to Chevreul’s work when defending the colours used to decorate the 1862 exhibition building, his own arrangement was unfavourably compared to that of Jones:

Compare the colouring of the 1851 building, or the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, with this, and we see that. . .[the] blues and yellows are not of that violent kind that Mr. Crace’s artist, as he calls him, has been allowed to throw in ‘quite promiscuously’ as to tint.241

Contrary to Crace’s, Jones’s chromatic arrangements were directly inspired by his painstaking studies of the polychromy of the past, which the architect spent his life trying to revive as a means to help contemporary artists find their own style.

Jones’s first pivotal chromatic revelation was triggered by his study of the Alhambra in 1832 with the architect Jules Goury, former assistant to the German chromophile Gottfried Semper. When Plans, Elevations, Sections and Details of the Alhambra were published in twelve parts over a period of almost ten years, from 1836 to 1845, they were lavishly illustrated with dazzling chromolithographs, a new technique which Jones helped to pioneer. To highlight the key role the Alhambra played in Jones’s career, Henry Wyndham Phillips painted the architect in a typically Victorian black suit, but standing in a room