Watson and the Shark

This chapter is concerned with the way in which courtly fantasies involving blacks and Africa were absorbed and adapted by the increasingly self-confident urban populations emerging in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in London and Paris in particular. If the court remained the dominant cultural force in Italy, in Germany (whether Catholic or Protestant principalities), and in...

During the closing decades of the eighteenth century, years of revolutionary convulsions on both sides of the Atlantic, not only in politics but in all walks of life and thought and art as well, the ways in which blacks were regarded underwent profound and far-reaching changes ...

Technical examination of the paint layer can confirm a work’s age or authenticity and add to knowledge of the painting’s execution and the artist’s intended effects. Examination can address either the materials or the ways they were handled—the techniques. Study of paint materials offers information that is specific but of limited interpretive use to the art historian. Pigment identification can deny (but rarely confirm) a paintings age, or can identify areas of repaint. Precise identification …