From the Realist canvases of the Pre-Raphaelites to the Aesthetic experiments of James McNeill Whistler, The Chosen Race confronts the complex negotiations of whiteness that played out across British art of the nineteenth century. Examining the representation of racial supremacy, difference, and indeterminacy in paintings produced in England during the reign of Queen Victoria, Keren Rosa Hammerschlag explores the many ways Victorian painters engaged with racial ideas at the height of British imperial dominance. While at times these painters reinforced racial hierarchies, at other times they problematized them, revealing race to be a fundamentally unstable organizing principle by which to build an empire and classify its subjects.
Keren Rosa Hammerschlag is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Curatorship at the Australian National University in Canberra and author of Frederic Leighton: Death, Mortality, Resurrection.
"Keren Rosa Hammerschlag’s The Chosen Race: Troubling Whiteness in Victorian Painting will certainly be on the next Index Librorum Prohibitorum in our age of Trump II. She brilliantly teases out how expectations of whiteness and difference were perpetual themes in high art in the age of British colonial expansion and consolidation. Race is color and color is race, especially when color organizes a hierarchy of human beings. Hammerschlag’s sophisticated tracing of whiteness from fantasies of Christ’s paleness in images found in virtually every Victorian home to the manufacture of whiteness in the cosmetic industry of the day resulting in products found on most Victorian nightstands is transformative of the way we see the Victorians through their artists seeing the world."—Sander L. Gilman, author of Difference and Pathology
"Tracking 'whiteness' across the terrain of Victorian painting, Hammerschlag makes sharp, surprising connections across genres and styles. Brilliantly revealing the instability of visual discourses of identity, she mounts a powerful argument that 'race' is a fundamental concern of all British art in an age of empire."—Pamela Fletcher, Bowdoin College
"The Chosen Race makes a crucial contribution to scholarship on the representation of race. Writing in clear, engaging, and intelligent prose, Hammerschlag reveals the significant role of Victorian art in generating racial definitions that became essential to the foundation and function of empire. In analyzing how whiteness established itself as a superior position in visual art, this timely and important book calls attention to the ways in which 'white' still functions today as an often-invisible norm."—Nancy Rose Marshall, University of Wisconsin–Madison
276 pp.7 x 10Illus: 100 color images
9780520420953$60.00|£50.00Hardcover
Feb 2026