ARH 226 - Gender, Race and Fashion in Western Portraiture, 1500-1950

4 credits (Fall or Spring)

Explores race, gender, and fashionable dress as co-constitutive forces in portraiture from 1500 to 1950. We will investigate self-portraiture, group portraiture, historiated portraiture, and allegorical personification. If idealized white, female beauty is one of portraiture’s longstanding fetishes, how do notions of sexual difference, physiognomy, and skin-color, among other variables, inflect representation? Subjects range from Tudor England, Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, and Velázquez to Qing China, Viceregal Mexico, nineteenth-century Paris, and post-war New York.

Prerequisite: ARH 103.
Note: Not offered every year.
Instructor: Staff