“Des couleurs primitives”: Miscegenation and French Painting of Algeria

Abstract

The Romantic concept of “local color” refers to a site of painterly experimentation, the application of pigment in the chromatic construction of a picture. The term also identifies a detail authenticating an exotic subject considered typical of a particular region. This article zeroes in on the convergence of these two aspects of local color, interrogating the dialogue between subject and technique in the representation of North Africans. In their paintings from the late 1840s depicting “primitive” racial types from the Maghrib, Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) and Théodore Chassériau (1819–1856) shifted to a color system that emphasized contrasts of distinct zones of color derived from an ethnological spectrum over smooth transitions and harmonies between hues. Unpacking the coordinates, including the trope of the mixed‐blood, and the unstable classificatory schemas of physical anthropology suggests that these painters' unconventional colorism and formal daring indexed the pervasive anxiety that miscegenation would lead to racial chaos.