Finding The Irish Girl: Race, displacement, and the aesthetic promise of portraiture

Abstract

Aesthetic considerations have often been ignored, or even derided, when it comes to discussions of race in the 19th century. A disregard for aesthetics and the genres that arise from aesthetic experience has prevented critics from seeing how crucial such questions are to thinking about racial formations. This essay argues for the necessity of taking aesthetic practices and effects seriously in contending with questions of Irishness and anti-Irish racism in Victorian Britain. In attending to Pre-Raphaelite fellow-traveler Ford Madox Brown's The Irish Girl (1860), this essay demonstrates how formal approaches not only allow us to observe how racial formations come to be in aesthetic terms but also teach us how to fully see the subject of the painting herself. Thinking about the painting according to the conventions of portraiture is significant for understanding the strategies by which minoritized racialized subjects—and particularly women and girls—make themselves visible.