Seeing Whiteness on the Gallery Wall: Race Through the Prism of Three Early Modern Portraits

Abstract

I am frequently told how race in the early modern period had little do with colour, and instead signified lineage, class, and gender. Therefore, any attempts to racialise the period is anachronistic. The effects of such a restriction is to close off any discussion on anti-racist history telling, and fails to recognise how the colonial project, as manifested in British imperial legacies, underpins early modern visual culture and its presentation in museum and gallery spaces. I wish to mitigate this tendency by offering, from my lived experience as a Black woman, an analysis of how aristocratic whiteness shaped constructions of race in the period. My focus will be on three early modern portraits from the collection at Tate Britain: Marcus Gheereart’s Portrait of Captain Thomas Lee (1594); Gheeraert’s Portrait of an Unknown Woman (1595); and The Cholmondeley Ladies, painted by an unattributed artist (c.1600). My paper will subvert the usual historical debates on early modern constructions of race and indigeneity, which tend to begin with a focus on an emphatic Blackness in comparison to an unmarked and unraced whiteness. And instead offer a road map for curators, museum staff and historians. Alerting them to the blinding nature of whiteness, its ability to obscure, and the consequent need therefore to consciously and independently ‘see’ and ‘hold’ whiteness in their minds.