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On sera toujours réduit en dernière analyse aux trois couleurs primitives… auxquelles on joint le blanc pour exprimer la lumière & le noir pour en exprimer la privation.
[Ultimately, one has to use primal colors … to which white is added to express light and black to express its deprivation.]
-Claude-Henri Watelet, 17881
In 1788 the art theorist Claude-Henri Watelet declared in his entry on color in the Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts that the color white was expressive of light and, consequently, in the age of Enlightenment, of clairvoyance and human intelligence driven by a wish for perfectibility. In the eighteenth century, the metaphor of the Enlightenment to evoke a body of juridical, philosophical, artistic, scientific, and literary projects and debates was already in use.2 The association on the one hand of the white race with rational progress, and on the other of the black race with its absence and privation-which can be deduced not only from this rather harmless sentence but more generally from the aesthetic discourses of the eighteenth century-corresponded to a widely held conviction that intelligence was divided up among human beings according to a skin color line, a pigmentary demarcation, objective and obvious to the naked eye. Watelet adapted to the aesthetic field Sir Isaac Newton's color theory, which dictated that white is actually composed of the visible spectrum of all colors reflected and that black does not refract light. Newton elaborated on this theory in his Opticks treatise of 1704, which was translated into French by the physician, journalist, abolitionist, and soon-to-be revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat in 1787, one year before the publication of Watelet's dictionary entry.3 By appropriating Newton's color theory almost a century later, the French artistic theoretician charged this descriptive analysis of physical evidence with decades of philosophical debates regarding the Enlightenment, slavery, and human diversity. Indeed, it echoed the plurality of skin colors and the prominent bipolarity of Whites and Blacks in the human categorization process and earth mapping.4
This article seeks to demonstrate how artistic production and discourse in the eighteenth century produced tools of observation and analysis that allowed human beings to be differentiated as well as implicitly classified on a moral scale, an enterprise that would later veer into explicit racism....