Embodiments of empire: Figuring race in late Victorian painting

This dissertation analyzes representations of racial identity in late-nineteenth-century British painting, during an era of heightened imperialism. I examine colonial battle subjects and allegorical figures in academic art, as well as the dialogue between classical subject painting and Victorian racial theory as manifest in the study of anatomy.;Chapter Two centers around Edwin Long's series The Daughters of Our Empire, painted for Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in 1887. This group of twenty canvases represents Great Britain and several of its colonies as female figures with symbolic attributes, and I consider these personifications within the genre of "types of beauty" images popular during the 1880s. Long constructed a vision of the British Empire as a realm of beautiful women, symbolic daughters of the Queen, thereby inviting Victorian viewers to imagine the colonies as feminine children, dependent on male protection.;Chapter Three analyzes the ramifications of an imperial mindset that associated Victorian Britain to ancient Rome in terms of empire building, but also linked the Victorians themselves to ancient Greeks in terms of racial descent through the doctrine of Aryanism. Many contemporaries believed British women, in particular, embodied distinct physical traits of classical Greeks, thus supporting the theory that saw Great Britain as the most recent manifestation of an Aryan civilization. I interrogate the idealized white bodies seen in classical subject paintings by Frederic Leighton and others, setting such images against the discourse of feminine beauty and racial fitness.;Contemporary military subjects offered an opportunity for artists to display the heroic male body in a modern context. British battle painters frequently depicted white soldiers in combat with non-western "savages" shown in a range of types, from noble to bestial. Chapter One examines the aesthetic construction of race and masculinity in images of the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War. For many Victorians, Zulu men epitomized the idea of the noble, if savage, warrior. Paintings of the war, such as Charles Fripp's The Battle of Isandhlwana (1885), contrasted these figures with another type of idealized warrior, the British soldier, whose characterization in such images also signaled his elevated status.