Deans-Smith, Susan

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FEATURES REVIEWS TEACHING WATCH & LISTEN ABOUTThe past is never dead. It's no t  even pastNOT EVEN PASTSearch the  si te ...XNEP  Second Edit ion: CastaPaintingsBy Susan Deans-SmithCASTA PAINTINGSby Susan Deans-SmithFrom the Editors: Not Even Past Second Editions update and republish some of our most important andwidely read articles.In 1746 Dr. Andrés Arce y Miranda, a creole attorney from Puebla, Mexico, criticized a series of paintingsknown as the cuadros de castas or casta paintings. Offended by their depictions of racial mixtures of theinhabitants of Spain's American colonies, Arce y Miranda feared the paintings would send back to Spainthe damaging message that creoles, the Mexican-born children of Spanish parents, were of mixed blood.For Arce y Miranda, the paintings would only confirm European assumptions of creole inferiority,Privacy - TermsFEATURES REVIEWS TEACHING ~~ WATCH & LISTEN ABOUTana grew In popularity tnrougnout tne eignteentn century. 1 ney remaineda in aemana unui the majority orSpain's American colonies became independent in 1821. To date over one hundred and twenty full orpartial series of casta paintings have been documented. More continue to surface at art auctions or eventhrough serendipity such as the “casta-under-the couch’ discovery in 2015. Their popularity in theeighteenth and early nineteenth centuries suggest that many of Arce y Miranda's contemporaries did notshare his negative opinions of the paintings.FEATURES REVIEWS TEACHING WATCH & LISTEN ABOUTI - Lg .The casta series represent different racial mixtures that derived from the offspring of unions betweenSpaniards and Indians—mestizos, Spaniards and Blacks—mulattos, and Blacks and Indians—zambos.Subsequent intermixtures produced a mesmerizing racial taxonomy that included labels such ag no ©entiendo,” (“I don't understand who you are”), an offspring of so many racial mixtures that made gncestrydifficult to determine, or “salta atras” (“a jump backward”) which could denote African ancestry.FEATURES REVIEWS TEACHING ~~ WATCH & LISTEN ABOUTarusts remain anonymous, tNOSe WNo Nave DEEN Iaenunea INCIUJe Some or te  MOST Prominent paintersin eighteenth-century Mexico including Miguel Cabrera, Juan Rodriguez Juarez, José de Ibarra, JoséJoaquin Magén, José de Paez, José de Alcibar, and Francisco Vallejo.Casta paintings were presented most commonly in a series of sixteen individual canvases or a singlecanvas divided into sixteen compartments, with significant variations in size. The series usually depict aman, woman, and child, arranged according to conceptions of hierarchies of race and status, the latterincreasingly represented by occupation as well as dress by the mid-eighteenth century. The paintings areusually numbered and the racial mixtures identified in inscriptions. Spanish men are often portrayed asmen of leisure or professionals, blacks and mulattos as coachmen, Indians as food vendors, and mestizosas tailors, shoemakers, and tobacconists. Mulattas and mestizas are often represented as cooks,spinners, and seamstresses. Despite clear duplications, significant variations and innovations occur incasta series produced throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Whereas some seriesfocus on representation and specification of racial mixtures, dress styles, and material culture, others aremore detailed in their representation of flora and fauna peculiar to the New World (avocadoes, prickly pear,parrots, armadillos, and different types of indigenous peoples). While the majority appear to be in urbansettings, several series depict rural landscapes.FEATURES REVIEWS TEACHING WATCH & LISTEN ABOUTRi ' o l  a .  a po  yWhat do these exquisitely beguiling, if sometimes disturbing, images tell us about colonial society andSpanish imperial rule? As with textual evidence, we cannot take them as unmediated and transparentsources but they are remarkable for what they reveal about perceptions of genealogy and differefice.Spanish elites’ anxiety about the breakdown of a clear socio-racial hierarchy in colonial society—thesistema de castas or caste system—that privileged a white, Spanish elite partially accounts fortFEATURES REVIEWS TEACHING ~~ WATCH & LISTEN ABOUTMIXea-race people IN 1aeaiizea 1erms. INsteaa or tne beggars, vagrants, ana arunks na t  populatedtravelers’ accounts and Spanish bureaucratic reports about its colonial populations, viewers gaze uponscenes of prosperity and domesticity, of subjects engaged in productive labor, consumption, andcommerce. Familiar tropes of the idle and drunken castas are only occasionally depicted in scenes ofdomestic conflict. In addition, European desires for exotica and the growing popularity of natural historycontributed to the demand for casta paintings with its taxonomic impulses. The only extant casta seriesfrom Peru was commissioned as a gift specifically for the natural history collection of the Prince ofAsturias (the future Charles IV of Spain). And despite Dr. Arce y Miranda's fears, many contemporariesbelieved the casta series offered positive images of Mexico and America as well as of Spanish imperialrule. In this regard, casta paintings tell us as much about Mexico's and Spain's aspirations and resourcesas they do about racial mixing and racial anxieties. Many owners of casta paintings were high-rankingcolonial bureaucrats, military officials, and clergy, who took their casta paintings back to Spain with themwhen they completed their service in America. But there is also evidence of patrons from the middlingranks of the colonial bureaucracy and society. Fragmentary data on the price of casta paintings suggeststhat their purchase would not have been restricted to only the very wealthy.The casta paintings were displayed in official public spaces, such as museums, universities, high rankingofficials’ residences and palaces, as well as in unofficial spaces when some private collections would beopened up to limited public viewing. The main public space where casta paintings could have been viewedby a wider audience was the Natural History Museum in Madrid.FEATURES REVIEWS TEACHING WATCH & LISTEN ABOUTRegardless of what patrons and artists may have intended casta paintings to convey, viewers respondedto them according to their own points of reference and contexts. While much remains to be learned aboutwho saw sets of casta paintings and where they saw them, fragmentary evidence suggests varigd—audience responses. The English traveler Richard Phillips, visiting the Natural History Museum inf Madrid in1803, enthusiastically encouraged his readers to go and see the casta paintings as exemplary eFEATURES REVIEWS TEACHING ~~ WATCH & LISTEN ABOUTEXPressea SKepucIsIm apout tne INSCriptons tnat aescrinea ne  racial MiXures aepicied In a casta serieshe viewed in a private house in Malaga. And, to return to Arce y Miranda in Mexico, the casta paintings forhim signified a slur on the reputation of creoles in Mexico.Their growing desirability outside of Mexico and Spain, is demonstrated by their appearance in Europeancollections, some through purchase at auction or private transaction, others — allegedly — through morenefarious means. Several sets, for example, can be identified in English collections as early as the mid-eighteenth century.. The British landscape painter Thomas Jones (1742-1803) made a diary entry for 19thAugust, 1774 about a set of casta paintings — “curious pictures painted in Spanish-America, representingthe different degrees of  mixture” — he viewed at his friend's house, “Mr Skottow’s [sic] o f  Chesham.”The painter, art dealer, entrepreneur, and museum owner, James Bisset (1760-1832), displayed hiscollection of casta paintings in his “Cabinet of the Fine Arts,” in Leamington Spa before they were put upfor sale sometime between 1820 and after his death in 1832.* Joseph William Noble (1799-1861), aphysician and Lord Mayor of Leicester (1841 to 1859) donated a partial series — from “The School ofMexico” — to the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery in 1852.And, of course one of the most famous casta series in an English collection is to be found at BreamoreHouse in Hampshire, attributed to the Mexican painter Juan Rodriguez Juarez. A series of fifteen copperplate casta paintings by José de Paéz, dated 1766, also made its way into the art collection of the Germanpainter Dominicus Gottfried Waerdigh (1700-1789) and was auctioned at the Stock Exchange Hall inHamburg in 1790 after his death (Getty Provenance Index Sale Catalog D-A201, Lot 0179]o)).Recent scholarship has advanced our understanding of the development of this provocative genre indeeply significant ways. Much still remains to be understood, however, about the production, patronage,collection, and reception of the casta paintings in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and thecolonial imaginary.This is an electronic version of an article published in the Colonial Latin American Review © 2005Copyright Taylor & Francis; Colonial Latin American Review is available online atwww.tandfonline.com http.//www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10609160500314980*my thanks to Rebecca Earle for sharing this information on BissetFor more on casta paintings:FEATURES REVIEWS TEACHING WATCH & LISTEN ABOUTana Lasia Faintngs ( Luus)»Rebecca Earle, “The Pleasures of Taxonomy: Casta Paintings, Classification, and Colonialism,TheWilliam and Mary Quarterly, vol. 73, number 3, (2016): 427-466Maria Concepcién Garcia Saiz, Las castas mexicanas: un género pictdrico americano (1989)llona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of  Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (2004)—————= “White or Black? Albinism and Spotted Blacks in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World." InPamela A. Patton ed., Envisioning Others. Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America (2016),142-186Jean-Paul Zufiga, “Muchos negros, mulatos y otros colores.” Visual Culture and Colonial Knowledge in theEighteenth Century,’ (trans. from the French by Brian Horihan) Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, vol. 68,1 (2013): 45-76Image credits:1. De Espafiol y Mestizo, Castizo de Miguel Cabrera. N°. Inv. 000062. De Chino Cambujo y India, Loba de Miguel Cabrera. N°. Inv. 000113. Castas de  Luis de  Mena.  N2.Inv. 00026Posted by permission of El Museo de América, MadridThe views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of  the individual author(s) orpresenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views o f  the editors at  Not Even Past, the UTDepartment o f  History, the University o f  Texas at  Austin, or the UT System Board o f  Regents. Not EvenPast is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we makeefforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past isnot responsible for any errors or omissions.Posted November 10, 20217More FeaturesFEATURES REVIEWS TEACHING WATCH & LISTENRECENT POSTS“Texas, Our Catholic Texas"?A Lager Beer Revolution: The History of Beer and GermanAmerican ImmigrationTeaching about Colonial Latin America through ObjectsFear and Lust in  the  Desert, o r  How Lies, Deception, andTrickery Made California a Date Palm MonopolyLast Seen: Teaching about Slavery through the Lens of theDomestic Slave Trade and Family SeparationNOT EVEN PAST is produced byThe Department of HistoryTHE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTINWe are supported by the College of Liberal ArtsAnd our READERSDONATECONTACTAll content © 2010-present NOT EVEN PAST and the authors, unlessotherwise notedFEATURES REVIEWS TEACHING WATCH & LISTEN ABOUTABOUTSign up to receive our MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

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