A Matrilineal Descent: Racial Inheritances in Victorian Paintings of Mothers and Their Children

Keren Hammerschlag gives a talk at The Courtauld on Wednesday 2 December, looking at racial inheritances in Victorian paintings of mothers and their children. It's presented by the Manton Centre for British Art, and the whole thing runs from 18:00 to 19:30 in Lecture Theatre 2 at the Vernon Square campus (WC1X 9EW).

The talk draws on Hammerschlag's book, The Chosen Race: Troubling Whiteness in Victorian Painting (University of California Press, 2026), which examines how Victorian artists, biologists and anthropologists depicted mothers and children. A big part of that was how the offspring of inter-racial unions were thought to reveal whether races shared a common origin — monogenism — or belonged to distinct species — polygenism. It's the kind of thing that sat at the intersection of art and the pseudo-science of the day, and Hammerschlag traces how those ideas worked their way into the paintings.

She uses Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The Beloved (1865-6) as a case study. In it, Rossetti painted a Black child alongside a fair-skinned bride and racially diverse bridesmaids, and Hammerschlag argues the image traces the trauma of the forced removal of mixed-race children from their mothers under American slavery and British colonialism. It's a heavy subject, but one that changes how you look at a painting you might have otherwise walked past without a second thought.

The Manton Centre for British Art is the one putting it on; it was established in 2025 with a £9.5 million donation from the Manton Foundation and named after collectors Sir Edwin and Lady Florence Manton. It awards scholarships, hosts visiting fellows and gives the annual Manton Lecture. Hammerschlag herself is Director of the Centre for Art History and Art Theory at the Australian National University and a Courtauld PhD alumna, so she's coming back to her old stomping ground for this one. The talk is free, though booking is essential.