Engraving’s “Immoveable Veil”: Phillis Wheatley’s Portrait and the Politics of Technique PDF

The Art Bulletin ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcab20 Engraving’s “Immoveable Veil”: Phillis Wheatley’s Portrait and the Politics of Technique Jennifer Y. Chuong To cite this article: Jennifer Y. Chuong (2022) Engraving’s “Immoveable Veil”: Phill...

The Art Bulletin ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcab20 Engraving’s “Immoveable Veil”: Phillis Wheatley’s Portrait and the Politics of Technique Jennifer Y. Chuong To cite this article: Jennifer Y. Chuong (2022) Engraving’s “Immoveable Veil”: Phillis Wheatley’s Portrait and the Politics of Technique, The Art Bulletin, 104:2, 63-88, DOI: 10.1080/00043079.2022.2000260 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00043079.2022.2000260 Published online: 01 Jun 2022. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 51 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcab20  Engraving’s “Immoveable Veil”: Phillis Wheatley’s Portrait and the Politics of Technique jennifer y. chuong As an eighteenth-century scene it does not seem particularly noteworthy: a young woman sits at an oval desk, pictured in the act of composition (Fig. 1). She is neatly, if plainly, dressed, 1 Artist unknown, Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. and she holds herself with a relaxed dignity, the gentle curve of her back reiterated by the John Wheatley, of Boston, 1773, from Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, London: serpentine stile of her chair. With her right hand she touches a quill pen to paper, on which A. Bell, 1773, frontispiece, British, engraving, 6 x 41/8 a few lines of writing can be seen, and her left hand lends gentle support to her head. An in., cropped (15.4 x 10.5 cm). National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC (artwork in the public domain; photograph extended finger draws attention to her face, especially her calm gaze, directed upward in con- provided by National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC) templation of her next words. Again, not a particularly noteworthy scene, therefore, except for two things: the darkness of the young woman’s skin, framed by the white of her cap, handkerchief, and shift cuff; and the words inscribed into the portrait’s oval frame: “Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston.” The word “servant” here is a euphemism: when the London printer Archibald Bell published a book authored by Phillis Wheatley (ca. 1753–1784) in the fall of 1773, she was an enslaved member of the Wheatley household. And yet, as suggested both by her representation in the portrait and by the fact of the portrait itself, her experience of slavery was an unusual one.1 Born in the Senegambia region of West Africa and transported to Boston in 1761 as a child of seven or eight years, Phillis (renamed for the ship that brought her to Boston; her birth name is lost) was purchased by John Wheatley to serve as a companion to his wife Susanna.2 In this role Wheatley learned to read and write, and she soon began to compose poems that garnered first local, then international, attention. Ultimately, interest in the young prodigy led to the publication of her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). In addition to thirty-nine poems authored by Wheatley, Poems features the engraved frontispiece portrait introduced above.3 Long recognized as an important first in the history of Black portraiture, the frontispiece has also been touted as an exemplary object in the history of liberal reform strategy. In tandem with Wheatley’s poetry, this portrait was meant to attest to the material existence of an enslaved person who, by virtue of her intelligence, erudition, and imagination, exploded slavery’s foundational claim that enslaved persons were objects to be bought and sold.4 (And as a material con- sequence of her book and events surrounding it, Wheatley obtained her freedom shortly after its publication.)5 63 2 Artist unknown, Selina Hastings, Countess of In considering the enfranchising aspects of Wheatley’s portrait, scholars have focused Huntingdon, 1770?, British, oil on card, 221/4 × 171/4 in. (56.5 × 43.8 cm). National Portrait Gallery, on its details and attributes. Some of these seem straightforward, like the book and quill London (artwork in the public domain; photograph that profess Wheatley’s literacy, or her upright posture, which speaks to her well-mannered © National Portrait Gallery, London) comportment.6 Based on astute iconographic analysis, other, more debated attributes have 3 John Singleton Copley, Mrs. Theodore Atkinson, Jr. also been shown to support the portrait’s ennobling aims. Wheatley’s dress is simple, but as (Frances Deering Wentworth), 1765, oil on canvas, 51 × 40 in. (129.5 × 101.6 cm). Crystal Bridges Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw has pointed out, her white shawl and beribboned bonnet make Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (artwork in it less the dress of a servant than an echo of the relatively modest dress worn by her book’s the public domain; photograph by Dwight Primiano) Methodist patron, the Countess of Huntingdon, in several of the Countess’s portraits from the period (Fig. 2).7 Similarly, the starkness of the depicted space is offset by the oval table- top and curved stile of the poet’s chair, situating Wheatley, as Marcia Pointon has noted, in a pictorial context of female gentility. As Pointon points out with regard to John Singleton Copley’s portrait of Frances Deering Wentworth (Mrs. Theodore Atkinson, Jr.), for a woman to be seated at a table, especially a small circular one, “is... a sign of leisure, not of labor.” (Fig. 3).8 Wheatley’s portrait’s attributes thus support a liberal assertion that with education and effort, the poet and other enslaved persons can transcend the object status assigned to them by the institution of chattel slavery. They confirm the humanity of this literate, neatly dressed, and well-postured individual, and therefore the injustice of her enslavement. However, this emphasis on the portrait’s liberatory potential does not address the full com- plexity of the frontispiece, or of Wheatley’s reception, which, from her own time through ours, has been deeply polarized.9 In focusing on the composition and attributes of Wheatley’s portrait, scholars may also have been motivated by a desire to emphasize the contributions of the original drafts- person. Since the early twentieth century, the design has often been ascribed to a compatriot of Wheatley’s—the enslaved artist Scipio Moorhead (active 1760–75).10 Shaw notes that this attribution, which has no substantive evidence to support it, is nonetheless seductive because it doubles the primacy of Wheatley’s portrait: in addition to being an early representation of an African American subject, it would also be an early work by an African American artist.11 Beyond its potential support of assertions regarding the portrait’s likeness, the Moorhead 64 The Art Bulletin June 2022 attribution would mean that statements about the portrait’s rhetoric are also statements about self-actualization within the enslaved community and thus complement the insertion of the portrait into a larger narrative of enfranchisement. However, as Shaw points out, this narra- tive comes with a cost: the emphasis on Moorhead’s authorship has contributed to a historical conception of Wheatley’s portrait as “an event rather than an object”—a point on a timeline rather than a work demanding close analysis.12 Setting aside the question of Moorhead’s authorship, it is important to recall that the original portrait did not circulate among a wide audience.13 What we have—and what eighteenth- century viewers had—is an engraved version made by an unidentified London printmaker, almost certainly a white man who did not meet Wheatley.14 And while the composition and iconography of the frontispiece may derive from the source image, its materiality and facture are products of engraving itself. Rather than looking past the print to a mythic original, it thus behooves us to look closely at the engraving itself for what it may say about its subject.15 By arguing for the meaningful nature of engraving in the Wheatley frontispiece, I seek to address the critical neglect that still attends prints, especially reproductive prints. For the most part, scholarship on prints remains divided between a historical focus on questions of production, circulation, and reception, and (for privileged works) a connoisseurial focus on questions of style and attribution. The question of how prints mean, especially how they mean as prints, is infrequently addressed.16 In the case of Wheatley’s portrait, this inattention is encouraged by the fact that it is an unsigned frontispiece and therefore occupies, at least by traditional standards, a minor place within the already minor class of reproductive prints. Yet it is precisely the portrait’s lowly status that allows it to illuminate larger questions about the relationship between technique and politics. Here I take the anonymity of the engraver and the prosaic origins of the frontispiece as an opportunity to move away from questions of biography and intentionality and consider instead the politics embedded in technique itself. As Teju Cole reminds us, “all technology arises out of specific social circumstances.” Cole’s statement is prompted by the fact that film emulsions, among other of photography’s tools, is generally calibrated for white skin.17 Yet his statement applies not only to highly engineered materials like film emulsions but also to the habits of hand and mind—that is, the techniques—of traditional mediums like painting, sculpture, and print as they are practiced in a given moment and place.18 Cole’s statement is particularly true of reproductive prints because the business of translating an image from one medium to another encourages the development of conventions and a working with, rather than against, engraving’s tools. For all that they are manually produced anew by the engraver each time they are enacted, such habits and conventions are, in their ubiquity and seeming transparency, akin to received technologies. Thus, whether the engraver consciously recog- nizes it or not, the practice of engraving has political implications—that is to say, the support, refutation, or reimagining of the specific social circumstances out of which it arises. In the pages that follow I articulate the complexity of Wheatley’s engraved portrait as engraving by examining its materialization of Wheatley’s racialized body and, in particu- lar, of her dark skin. As the encircling description on the frame of the frontispiece denotes, Wheatley was not just a servant, but a “Negro” servant. Attending to the way in which the engraving materializes race in her portrait is crucial, because, as I will argue, it was not Wheatley’s neat dress, modest comportment, or evident literacy for which her detractors damned her: it was the color and qualities of her skin. This doubled representation—of Wheatley as a person deserving of freedom, on the one hand, and of Wheatley as a person whose race precludes full subjective recognition, on the other—provides a key to understand- ing her vexed reception. 65 phillis wheatley’s portrait and the politics of technique  I begin by revisiting a foundational eighteenth-century description of Black skin by Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) to propose a relationship of material significance between it and Wheatley’s engraved portrait. I locate the basis of this relationship in early modern the- orizations of the “veil” as both an abstract concept and a representational device. The veil, I argue, was well suited to an early modern conception of skin as an idealized and homogenous covering; but as new anatomical ideas of, and aesthetic appreciation for, the subtle variation and variability of white skin developed over the course of the long eighteenth century, engrav- ing’s veil came to be a liability rather than an asset. In a period when tonal print processes like the mezzotint had become the preferred choice for rendering “fair” feminine skin, the engrav- er’s particular delineation of Wheatley’s dark skin reinforced a racist strand of Enlightenment thinking that drew a connection between the so-called monotony of Black skin and the impossibility of Black subjective expression. Placing the Wheatley frontispiece in a broader visual and discursive context, my analysis surfaces not only the racial politics that attend her portrait but also the imbricated nature of racial construction in this period. In closely analyzing the qualities of engraving and reconstructing their meaning in the Wheatley frontispiece, I emphasize the “how” rather than the “what” of the poet’s repre- sentation, arguing for the methodological and theoretical importance of engaging the physical surface of an artwork as a complement to unearthing its latent meanings via iconographic interpretation.19 Considered in this way, line engraving reveals itself to be not only an important historical technique for the illustration of racial theories but a site of racial theorization in its own right. While all print techniques depend on the bifurcation of a matrix into printing and nonprinting areas, line engraving, which requires the engraver to deliberately carve distinct fur- rows into the copper plate, places special emphasis on the relationship between line and ground, between recess and projection, between black and white. It has thus been a particularly genera- tive technique for materializing the constitutive relationship between Blackness and whiteness. My attention to the engraved surface of the Wheatley frontispiece complements the work of scholars, including Krista Thompson, Anne Anlin Cheng, and Elizabeth Abel, who have analyzed the representation of Black skin as a charged surface, particularly in photography and film.20 While the recognized technicality of these mediums encourages such an approach, I aim to demonstrate that older media, such as print, also possess charged surfaces whose facture was manipulated to first materialize, and then hierarchize, racial difference. And whereas the lumi- nous surfaces of film and photography emphasize the visual aspects of representation, print— which transfers ink from one surface to another by bringing them into direct contact with one another—invites us to consider the tactile parallels between printed and bodily surfaces.21 By shifting our focus to the eighteenth century, a foundational moment in the history of race, and to print, which emphasizes questions of touch and materiality, this study contributes to a more robust historicization and theorization of Blackness as felt surface. Following Frantz Fanon and Paul Gilroy, scholars have extensively explored Blackness’s visual “epidermalization,” but Michelle Stephens points out that there is still a need for “a serious notion of skin, a theoret- ically articulated account of blackness as a cutaneous medium and bodily contact zone through which modern subjects negotiate and enact a profound desire to see [and, I would add, feel] difference.”22 To date, most of the scholars who have taken up this project, including Stephens, are literary scholars focusing on the modern and contemporary periods. Here I extend their work by demonstrating how art history’s strengths in material and historical analysis can give greater weight to “a serious notion of skin.”23 Indeed, following Mechthild Fend’s important work on the emergence of skin as a simultaneously scientific, aesthetic, and racialized subject, one might well assert that the medium of eighteenth-century print laid the conceptual and material groundwork for modern and contemporary art’s engagement with Blackness as material surface.24 66 The Art Bulletin June 2022 The Possibility of Black Expression It has long been recognized that Wheatley’s unusual experience of enslavement contributed to her personal accomplishments while also detracting from their full appreciation.25 Because she was purchased to serve as a companion to Susanna, Wheatley was treated differently than most enslaved persons or servants. She was spared arduous domestic tasks, instead becoming proficient at needlework.26 She was allowed to socialize with her enslavers’ guests and may have been allowed to pay social visits of her own.27 Perhaps most importantly, she was given an excellent, wide-ranging education.28 This was an exceptional act on her enslavers’ part, but it would not have become as well-known in the annals of American history had Wheatley not proven to be an exceptional student. In 1766, five years after arriving in Boston with (we believe) no knowledge of English, Wheatley was able to write a letter to the Mohegan min- ister Samson Occom as well as compose a four-line elegy on a neighbor’s death. Following the 1770 publication of another elegy, this time for the renowned Anglican evangelist George Whitefield, Wheatley herself became a transatlantic celebrity, paving the way for the publica- tion of Poems in 1773. Wheatley’s poetry reflects the poetry of her time: one of her contemporaries observed that “no species of poetry is more frequently attempted” than the elegy.29 As she developed in poetic confidence, Wheatley also addressed political and philosophical subjects using the themes, forms, and devices of the then-popular neoclassical style. Yet her engagement with the subject on which modern readers have most expected her to expound—slavery—was del- icate at best, and abject at worst.30 Wheatley is best known, or rather decried, for the poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” which begins with the controversial line, “‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land [emphasis in original].” For its seeming complicity in paternalistic defenses of the transatlantic slave trade, Henry Louis Gates has described this as “the most reviled poem in African American literature.”31 But more crucially, Gates notes, Wheatley’s poetry has been impugned as much for its style as for its content. Since the late nineteenth century, her formal, neoclassical verse, with its Popean echoes, has commonly been read by critics as evidence of both a damning lack of racial consciousness and the work’s literary insignificance.32 As scholars have begun to explore more balanced approaches to Wheatley’s poetry, her frontispiece portrait has, at first slowly and then with increasing momentum, garnered a significant amount of critical attention. Early interpretations by literary scholars, respond- ing to the long-held disparagement of Wheatley’s writing, grasped at the extraordinary fact of the frontispiece, arguing that its very existence—what Walter Nott terms its “palpable presence”—was, as Betsy Erkkila puts it, enough to “splinter the categories of white and black and explode a social order grounded in notions of racial difference.”33 But as Erkkila acknowledges, the revolutionary potential of Wheatley’s portrait has to be balanced against the poet’s complicated reception. More recent scholarship has contextualized the frontispiece by comparing it to other representations of female subjects, and to representations of authors and other creative individuals.34 By focusing on the iconography and format of the poet’s por- trayal, these readings successfully address Astrid Franke’s critique that “race overrides all other details of Wheatley’s physical depiction.”35 And yet this means, in turn, that the representa- tion of race has been set aside in recent interpretations of the frontispiece. While the relegation of race has made space for a more comprehensive understand- ing of Wheatley’s portrait, it is also problematic because race has always been an integral part of her reception. Take, for example, Thomas Jefferson’s assessment of Wheatley in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785, first version completed 1781). There, the statesman famously dismisses Wheatley’s poems as being “beneath the level of critique.” “Religion,” 67 phillis wheatley’s portrait and the politics of technique he writes, “indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately [sic]; but it could not produce a poet.”36 Gates astutely points out that Jefferson’s comments damningly changed the terms of cri- tique: whereas Wheatley’s supporters had envisioned her book (and portrait) as proving the possibility of a Black author, Jefferson demands poetic quality in addition to the mere fact of authorship.37 (That said, Jefferson does not balk at also questioning mere fact: rather than acknowledge Wheatley’s authorship, he deprecatingly alludes to “the poems produced under her name.”)38 Significantly, Jefferson’s dismissal occurs in the middle of a well-known passage in which the statesman—almost in the same breath—denounces slavery and yet upholds racial inequality. While much emphasis has been placed on Jefferson’s historical justifications for proposing the mass expatriation of Blacks from the United States, his extended meditation also seeks to establish a more essential—that is, biological—difference between Black and white persons.39 Jefferson’s tendentious comparison of Black and white bodies is wide ranging, but his primary argument concerns the differential appearance and behavior of skin. In claiming this distinction, Jefferson’s language slips between political, scientific, and aesthetic discourse: The first difference which strikes us is that of colour. Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race?40 Jefferson’s phrase “that immoveable veil of black” seems especially resonant when we examine the Wheatley frontispiece: indeed, given the phrase’s spatial proximity to Jefferson’s critique of Wheatley, the surprising virulence of his response to a book already eight years old,41 and his known visual sensitivity, it is worth speculating whether the portrait may have inspired the phrase (Fig. 4).42 The engraved lines that render the poet’s skin are regularly spaced and angled such that the cross-hatching resembles a woven cloth that has been gently stretched along its bias to follow the contours of her face, neck, and arms. This resemblance is height- ened by the densely scattered dots that the engraver used to darken the value of Wheatley’s skin.43 Because of their incongruence with the linear pattern, the dots seem overrun by the crosshatched lines, adding to the impression that the hatching constitutes a layer—a veil—that intervenes between the viewer and the print’s subject.44 Addressing Jefferson’s passage in Notes, literary scholars like Jay Fliegelman and Mark Alan Mattes have used Jefferson’s characterization of Black skin’s inexpressiveness to propel us toward insights regarding his refusal to acknowledge the rational and imaginative capac- ities of Black persons—and specifically, those of Wheatley.45 While in agreement with these analyses, I am interested here in staying close to the surprisingly corporeal details of scarf-skin and reticular membrane, of blood and bile, of suffusions and secretions, that Jefferson used to anchor his aesthetic and social judgment. Jefferson’s meditation is more than a reflexive dismissal of Black subjectivity. His speculations and questions seek to define racial difference as one grounded in biological differences between Black and white bodies, specifically their skin color; and he fleshes out his speculations, quite literally, with a surprising knowledge of 68 The Art Bulletin June 2022 4 Artist unknown, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley, concepts from the vanguard of eighteenth-century anatomical knowledge. Simultaneously, of Boston (Fig. 1), detail of Wheatley’s face and arms. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA phrases like “the fine mixtures of red and white” and “immoveable veil” echo contemporary (artwork in the public domain; photograph © Houghton discussions among engravers and connoisseurs regarding line engraving’s mimetic limits. Library) As Fend has demonstrated, a relationship of significance underlies the early modern use of textile metaphors to conceptualize skin seen under a microscope and its engraved— specifically its crosshatched—representation.46 In Jefferson’s passage, however, engraving’s veil is not just a neutral visual description of skin’s texture but a material embodiment of Black skin’s inscrutability. And while neither the word “monotony” nor “veil” necessarily carried negative connotations in the eighteenth century, the qualifying adjectives and context of the passage make it clear that Jefferson did intend these terms pejoratively. Referencing Jefferson’s familiarity with French aesthetic and natural-history discourses, Anne Lafont has argued that his description of Black skin, and specifically its impenetrability, was crucial not only to the 69 phillis wheatley’s portrait and the politics of technique 5 William Faithorne (engraver), Orinda, ca. 1667, statesman’s claims regarding Black inferiority but to his political ambitions for an American from Katherine Phillips, Poems, London: J. M. for H. Herringham, 1667, frontispiece, engraving, 91/4 × republic based on subjective transparency and the legibility of expression.47 In this regard, 61/4 in. (23.6 × 16 cm). Houghton Library, Harvard Jefferson may have been influenced by the fact that, as Katlyn Carter has demonstrated, “veil” University, Cambridge, MA (artwork in the public domain; photograph © Houghton Library) and its French equivalent, voile, were frequently invoked in American and French revolu- tionary contexts, respectively, as metaphors for the undesirability and illegitimacy of political 6 William Faithorne (engraver), Orinda (Fig. 5), detail secrecy.48 In an Enlightenment aesthetic paradigm that privileged the subtle variations, and of detail of Phillips’s face, neck, and dress (artwork in the public domain; photograph © Houghton Library) not-so-subtle variability, of fair skin as a basis for free political discourse, line engraving, pre- viously valorized for its idealized and consistent representation of human form, came to be experienced as too stable, too uniform. Engraving’s Veils The significance of the engraved representation of Wheatley’s skin requires historical con- textualization, because, to some extent, in her portrait we are simply confronting engraving’s conventional logic: its translation of form, texture, and other qualities into what William Ivins variously described as a “linear web” or, more polemically, a “net of rationality.”49 Over the course of the early modern period, engravers developed sophisticated linear systems for rep- resenting the world’s diverse forms in a unified manner. Engraving’s capacity for monolithic representation was especially well suited to early modern author frontispieces, which frequently adopted the conceit of a classical bust in order to project its associations of permanence, nobil- ity, and authority.50 In a 1667 frontispiece of the poet “Orinda” (Katherine Phillips), for exam- ple, the engraver William Faithorne used a cohesive schema across Phillips’s face and dress, 70 The Art Bulletin June 2022  such that skin and textile appear to be carved out of a single material (Figs. 5, 6). In this portrait, Phillips as woman and Phillips as statue are collapsed into one entity. Yet despite the widespread use of line engraving for portraits in the early modern period, engraving’s artifice was sometimes a source of unease, especially when applied to smooth objects like skin. Consider English virtu- oso John Evelyn’s (1620–1706) explanation of hatching in Sculptura, or, The History and Art of Chalcography and Engraving in Copper (1662) (Fig. 7). The figure in the untitled iconism and the essentials of its explanation were copied from Abraham Bosse’s Moyen universel de pratiquer la perspective sur les tab- leaux ou surfaces irrégulières (1653), but Evelyn additionally articulates the arti- ficiality of the engraver’s syntax.51 Fabric surfaces, Evelyn explains, are relatively easy to represent, because the texture of “Stuffs, Cloth, Linnen and other Draperies” offer delineable markers of their relief, or three-dimensional form. In other words, the visible weave of a textile provides a map of its folds and curves, which are easily replicated by engraving’s linear syntax. In contrast, the internal curvatures of “Nudities, and other smooth surfaces,” which offer “no such direction or clue,” require a representational convention to make their topography legible.52 In each of the two vignettes of the iconism borrowed from Bosse (hereafter referred to as Evelyn’s), a gridded frame sits between an object and the sun. Evelyn explains that engraving’s hatching replicates the pattern cast by the sun’s rays over the surface of the object (in the case of the upper illustration, a sphere), describing its outermost extents with thin, regu- larly spaced shadow lines whose arcs follow its curvature. Evelyn’s gridded screen evokes another famous device: the “veil” or “cut” described by Leon Battista Alberti in De pictura (1435) and depicted by Albrecht Dürer in The Draughtsman of the Lute (n.d.), among other instances 7 Artist unknown, Untitled iconism, from John Evelyn, (Fig. 8). A comparison of these two devices offers telling differences and similarities regard- 53 Sculptura, London: Printed by J. C. for G. Beedle and T. Collins, 1662, 122, British?, engraving, 93/8 × ing the representation and conception of surfaces. For Alberti, the delineation of an object’s 63/8 in. (23.7 × 16.2 cm). Houghton Library, Harvard extents—what he terms “drawing the profiles” of its visible surfaces—is the artist’s first and University, Cambridge, MA (artwork in the public domain; photograph © Houghton Library) most important task.54 Placed between the artist and the object in question, the veil facilitates this task by intersecting or “cutting” the intervening visual rays, such that the apparent con- tours of a given surface (the lute, in Dürer’s woodcut) are projected onto the gridded screen. In contrast, as Matthew Hunter has pointed out, Evelyn’s device modulates the physical form of the object: rather than the outline of the object being projected onto the screen, the threads of the screen are projected onto the object.55 We can clarify the distinction between Alberti’s and Evelyn’s conceits by considering the representation of a sphere according to each method. In the case of Alberti’s screen, the only aspect of the sphere captured by the “cut” is its con- tour; its convexity has to be suggested by other means.56 In the case of Evelyn’s screen, by contrast, the shadows cast by the grid drape themselves over the convex surface of the sphere, describing its contour only by implication (i.e., by their termination at the sphere’s depicted edge, or by a change in angle where the sphere meets the table). Evelyn’s explanation of engraving thus suggests a mode of representation counterposed to that described by Alberti: where Alberti privileged a surface’s contours over what he described as its “skin” or “dorsal extension,” the engraver’s conceit reverses their priority. In other words, Evelyn’s screen intro- duces what, borrowing from Christopher Pinney, we can term a “surfacist” mode of repre- sentation, in which the rendering of a surface’s “skin” is privileged over the delineation of its contours.57 This surfacist mode of representation marks a crucial first step toward tonal print 71 phillis wheatley’s portrait and the politics of technique  processes like mezzotint engraving, which eschew contour altogether—and in this regard it is notable that the single other illustration in Sculptura’s first volume is Prince Rupert of the Rhine’s mezzotint, The Little Executioner (Fig. 9). While paving the way for tonal print pro- cesses, the line engraving technique described by Evelyn nevertheless remained tied to its codified syntax—a fact that is especially evident when one compares the dry, didactic diagram of Evelyn’s engraved explanation to Rupert’s dramatic, atmo- spheric mezzotint. Even as Evelyn introduced the mezzotint to the English-speaking world, he continued to follow Alberti in conceiving of sur- faces as abstract entities, two-dimensional forms that define the outermost extents of an object. In other words, whether one traces its contours (Alberti), or hatches the curvature of its skin (Evelyn), in both of these modes of representa- tion a linear and formal, rather than coloristic, description of the surface is emphasized. In the second, lower vignette of Evelyn’s iconism, the sphere is replaced with a sculpted female head (“of white marble, or the like”).58 Whether it 8 Albrecht Dürer, The Draughtsman was recognized by Evelyn or not, the intuition of the Lute, n.d., woodcut, 51/8 × 71/4 in. (13 × 18.2 cm). that engraving’s hatching convention ought to Metropolitan Museum of Art, be elucidated with a sculptural body is apposite, New York (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by not only because it recalls engraving’s early mod- Metropolitan Museum of Art) ern association with sculpture but because the 9 Prince Rupert of the Rhine projected net produces a figure that, like most after José de Ribera, The Little marble or plaster bodies, represents the surface Executioner, 1662, from John Evelyn, Sculptura, London: Printed as a smooth, two-dimensional entity.59 Though it by J. C. for G. Beedle and T. can, with effort, represent wrinkles (i.e., actual Collins, 1662, between 144 and 145, mezzotint engraving, 51/4 × curvatures) in surfaces, engraving’s linear syntax 61/2 in. (13.1 × 16.4 cm). Yale is harder pressed to account for the almost imper- Center for British Art, New Haven, CT (artwork in the public domain; ceptible elements that give texture and depth photograph provided by the Yale to biological skin: the subtle changes in color Center for British Art) and tone, the delicate hairs and fuzzy down, the minute pores and tenuous lines. With regard to early modern portraits, like that of Katherine Phillips, such details were unimportant, even undesirable, but, as I discuss below, the aes- thetic paradigm would soon shift. The engraving of Wheatley’s skin in her frontispiece is thus surprising in its close alignment with Evelyn’s description, written over a century prior to her book’s publication. Her face and neck might easily have been substituted for the sculpted busts represented in Evelyn’s iconism and Phillips’s frontispiece—but only these bared portions of her body. Her clothing evidences instead the engraver’s nimble and inventive hand. Note the fine lines that trace the ruffles and folds of her cap, and the broken marks that skillfully evoke the reflective sheen of her dress fabric. In contrast, the lines that render Wheatley’s dark skin traverse its surface in a relentlessly regular pattern. Furthermore, the quality of these lines—their linear integrity, the smoothness of their taper and swell, their measured curvature—emphasize their 72 The Art Bulletin June 2022 graven-ness, or the unwavering, continuous, deep plough of the burin through the copper plate. They thus assert one of engraving’s defining qualities that made it such a prized means of reproduction in the early modern period: its strength and permanence.60 Engraving’s facture also forms the basis of its veil-like quality. To make a line engraving, an engraver carves a series of furrows into the polished surface of a copper matrix. Ink is applied to the plate and then wiped off the surface, such that (ideally) all traces of ink are removed from the smooth surface of the matrix while a maximum amount of ink is retained in the engraved lines. When the print is pulled, the paper is pressed against the matrix with great force, transfer- ring not only the inked design but also to some degree, the flatness of the matrix itself (as the paper is essentially “ironed” by the unmarked portions of the matrix). The integrity of the coppersmith’s surface is consequently maintained and mirrored in the final print, with the inked lines creating a relief that protrudes ever so slightly above the white areas of the print. There is thus in engraving an intimate, even inextricable, consonance between the relations of furrow to matrix, ink to paper, hatched surface to represented body. Just as they execute a representational program in which our eyes are carried across the surfaces they describe, engraving’s inked lines travel uninterruptedly on top of the paper’s surface, creating a literal material veil. When the engraver has done their work well, moreover, engraving’s hatched patterns can seem to constitute a shroud that is shaped by the represented forms of the print heaving and swirling beneath it, rather than being itself the form that conjures their illusionistic presence. Paradoxically, however, engraving’s veil-like presence is often most pronounced in the parts of the engraving that feature the smoothest, or least formally com- plicated forms: areas like Phillips’s face and décolletage, as opposed to the tight ringlets of her hair or the soft drape of her garment (see Figs. 5, 6). It is precisely in the most important areas of expression, therefore, that engraving’s “veil” obtrudes most strongly on our visual experi- ence of a portrait. And as Jefferson’s association of monotonous skin and muted subjectivity makes clear, by the third quarter of the eighteenth century, engraving’s “immoveable veil” could be equally, if not more decidedly, understood as a representational liability. “The Variety of the Surface” Almost as soon as they had adopted the sculptural conceit illustrated in Phillips’s portrait, the engravers of author frontispieces, especially those of women authors, began to depart from it.61 In a circa 1702 portrait of the poet Aphra Behn, the engraver rendered the majority of her face in small dashes and dots, interjecting hatching and cross-hatching only in local areas (Fig. 10).62 Elsewhere, as in a circa 1739 portrait of Elizabeth Rowe by George Vertue, the pat- tern is even more finely dissolved into a field of delicate, almost invisible, marks that seem to vibrate on the page (Fig. 11). In contrast, as I have noted, the portrait of Wheatley exaggerates engraving’s linearly coherent qualities to represent Black skin as a homogenous, unchanging surface. And while the Rowe portrait predates Wheatley’s by several decades, a 1777 copy exhibits many of the same qualities, thus underscoring the importance of these strategies in the representation of elevated subjects—even when the engraver lacked Vertue’s virtuosic skill (Fig. 12). Indeed, by the early eighteenth century, portraits, especially portraits of female sub- jects, had become key sites of experimentation, where engravers tested new ways of breaking engraving’s web so as to highlight not only the lightness of their subjects’ skin, but also its expressive variability. Ultimately this experimentation was joined, and then superseded, by tonal print processes that could better represent the delicate variety of corporeal surfaces.63 These formal changes track closely with shifts in English notions of fairness. Following early modern encounters by the English with other skin tones, fair skin, 73 phillis wheatley’s portrait and the politics of technique 10 Robert White after John Riley, Mrs. [Aphra] Behn, detail, ca. 1702, from Behn, Plays, London: Printed for Jacob Tonson... and R. Wellington [etc.], , frontispiece, engraving, 51/4 × 33/8 in. (13.2 × 8.6 cm). British Library, London (artwork in the public domain; photograph © British Library Board 11626.bb.5) 11 George Vertue (engraver), Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe (née Singer), detail, ca. 1739, from Rowe, The Miscellaneous Works in Prose and Verse, London: Printed for R. Hett... and R. Dodsley [etc.], 1739, frontispiece, engraving, 61/2 × 4 in. (16.7 × 10 cm). RB 357091, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the Huntington Library) 12 Thomas Kitchin (engraver), Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe, detail, 1777, from Thomas Gibbons, Memoirs of Eminently Pious Women, London: Printed for J. Buckland, 1777, between 446 and 447, engraving, 81/4 × 5 in. (21 × 12.5 cm). RB 220837, Huntington Library, San Marino, California (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the Huntington Library) conceptualized as whiteness, had become a privileged site of beauty.64 Prior to 1740, beauty manuals touted waters and other treatments that would “whiten the skin so like snow,” or “smooth, whiten, and preserve” it.65 Even when this primarily visual interest in epidermal whiteness was joined to tactile qualities of softness and delicacy, skin was couched in terms that emphasized its sculptural homogeneity, as when the seventeenth-century poet Edmund Waller heralded the “yielding Marble of a Snowy Breast.”66 By the second half of the eigh- teenth century, as Angela Rosenthal and others have noted, this interest had changed. Though aesthetic treatises and beauty manuals still privileged a fair skin, the emphasis was 74 The Art Bulletin June 2022  no longer on whiteness as an end in and of itself but on pale skin’s capacity for depicting “all the variations of the passions.”67 Fairness as whiteness was superseded by fair- ness as translucency, or what one essayist described as “the genuine glow of a British cheek” (Fig. 13).68 Throughout the Anglo-American world, the blush of pale skin was taken as an incorruptible sign of internal feeling, and thus as a key guarantor of a subject’s sincerity. In this context, the intimate relationship of engraving’s hatching to fabric— scarves, veils, and other draperies—became problematic, in that engraving’s woven syntax literally overwrote skin’s subtle surface qualities. Scholars have cited a number of possible causes for the new fascination with skin’s variability and delicacy, including the development of the “age of sentiment,” which valorized a visible expression of feeling, as well as a nation- alistic posturing against “French plaister” (thickly applied cosmetics), on the one hand, and a societal posturing against the increased usage of cosmetics among women of the mid- dling classes, on the other.69 While these explanations suggest important social causes for the new aesthetic appreciation of fair skin’s variability, we should also consider that the under- 13 Allan Ramsay, The Artist’s Wife, standing of skin’s very materiality and, concomitantly, its Margaret Lindsay of Evelick, 1758–60, oil on canvas, 291/4 × visual appearance, was altered in this period by the popular- 243/8 in. (74.3 × 61.9 cm). National ization of a new scientific instrument: the microscope.70 Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, Bequest of Lady Murray of Prior to the advent of the microscope, skin had been Henderland, 1861 (artwork in the construed as a homogenous casing for the body. Those who public domain; photograph © National Galleries of Scotland) possessed a specialized interest in such matters, like anato- mists and natural philosophers, followed classical authors in 14 Francesco Valesi after Odoardo Fialetti, Tabulae Decimae Sextae, conceptualizing skin as a fisherman’s net, a porous but essen- from Adriaan van de Spiegel and tially passive covering. This conceptualization was mirrored, Giulio Casseri, De humani corporis fabrica libri decem, Venice: Apud as Mieneke te Hennepe has pointed out, by the stylization Euangelistam Deuchinum, 1627, of skin as drapery in écorché (flayed) figures (Fig. 14).71 In the 77, engraving, 131/4 × 85/8 in. (34.2 × 22 cm). Houghton Library, early eighteenth century, this textorial understanding of skin Harvard University, Cambridge, MA was transformed by empiricists, particularly in the realms (artwork in the public domain; photograph © Houghton Library) of chemistry and medicine. Rather than defining surfaces as two-dimensional shells or mere terminations of bodies, mod- ern philosophers and practitioners attended to organic and inorganic surfaces at a much smaller scale, thereby forming a new idea of their significance as material interfaces. Where, for example, corporeal skin had been previously conceptu- alized as a mere envelope, the microscope revealed its func- tional thickness and its active role in controlling the exchange of fluids and gases between the body and its environment.72 In England, these new ideas about skin were disseminated by the anatomist William Cowper in his Anatomy of Humane Bodies (1698), which features detailed illustrations of skin’s microscopic structures (Fig. 15).73 Cowper’s text explains that, far from being a “simple” or homogenous entity, human skin is a complexly structured organ, made up of several layers, 75 phillis wheatley’s portrait and the politics of technique 15 Abraham Blooteling and Peter van Gunst after including the outermost cuticula, or scarf-skin. As these illustrations and the term “scarf-skin” Gérard de Lairesse, The Fourth Table, from William Cowper, The Anatomy of Humane Bodies, Oxford: evidence, the thinness and newly visible texture of the skin’s outer layer invited both visual Printed at the Theater for Sam. Smith and Benj. and conceptual comparisons to fabric. At the same time, anatomists realized that corporeal Walford... London, 1698, engraving, 20 × 123/4 in. (50.8 × 32.4 cm). Augustus C. Long Health Sciences skin was more than the cuticula, involving not only the underlying cutis but also many other Library, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, elements, including hairs, glands, and pores. Further, this heterogeneous organ was now New York (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library) understood to be not static but dynamic: mediating between the body and its surroundings, skin’s temperature, texture, and color are constantly in flux. Cowper’s observations were copied and extended by the surgeon Daniel Turner (1667–1741) in his De Morbis Cutaneis (1714), the first full-length, English-language medi- cal text on skin and its ailments, and a volume that saw three editions by 1735.74 Following Cowper, Turner explains to his reader that, far from being a simple entity, human skin is a complexly structured organ in its own right, made up of two layers, the cuticula or scarf-skin, and the underlying cutis.75 The cuticula, in particular, when seen through the microscope, was revealed to be a transparent layer made up of tiny overlapping scales, which exhibits differing thicknesses, as well as differing numbers of layers, across the body. Significantly, the strangeness of magnified skin seems to have cast that strangeness back onto skin seen without the microscope’s aid. In his description of skin’s structure, Turner repeatedly gestures toward its newly apprehended attributes, which, having been seen once, cannot be ignored, like the “innumerable and (to the naked Eye) almost imperceptible” pores that cover the body, or the subcutaneous glands, some obvious and some “not so evident to the naked Eye.”76 Turner’s repeated qualifiers (“almost imperceptible”; “not so evident”) reflect a fascination with the subtle differences exhibited by skin, which lay at vision’s limit. That Turner’s (and Cowper’s) ideas of skin found more general purchase is evidenced by their appearance in popular scientific manuals, like Francesco Algarotti’s Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of the Ladies (1737; English translation 1739) and Henry Baker’s The Microscope Made Easy (1742) as well as nonscientific texts, including Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and fashionable periodicals.77 In a 1754 issue of The Connoisseur, for example, “Mr. Town” rues his “pretty countrywomen’s” adoption of the Parisian fashion for heavy cosmetics and proposes “calling in the assistance of a surgeon to pare off this unnatu- ral Epidermis or Scarf-skin.”78 Representatively, Town’s use of the term “scarf-skin” reveals a specific knowledge of eighteenth-century anatomy, while his conflation of cosmetics and skin underscores the anxiety associated with corporeal coverings. Perhaps the most refined descrip- tion of this new, subtly variable skin was offered by Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757).79 Burke locates beauty’s apo- theosis in a woman’s “neck and breasts,” enjoining his reader to observe “the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same.”80 Echoing Turner’s evocation of skin’s “almost imperceptible” features, this new vision of skin seduces by joining the idea of imperceptible change (the “insensible swell”) to an infinitude of change (“never for the smallest space the same”).81 The pleasure expressed in Burke’s passage relies upon the fact that skin’s microscopic textures are nearly invisible to the naked eye. In Algarotti’s Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d, which is written as a series of conversations between a marchioness and her tutor, the marchioness’s beautiful hands, “the Subject of so many fine Verses,” become a touchstone for the desirability of natural limits. As the tutor explains, when viewed under a microscope, his pupil’s “smooth and polish’d” hands would be unrecognizable: not only would one see “a great Number of Pores” and a covering of “Scales like those of a Fish” but also “Cavit[i]es, Promontories; Valleys and Hills, for the Abode of a Nation of little Animals”; and her hands would further be traversed by a series of “Rivers and Seas.” Unsurprisingly, the marchioness 77 phillis wheatley’s portrait and the politics of technique  is disgusted by this description, and she and her tutor soon find themselves in happy accord that “it is to the Silence of our Reason, and the want of more refined Senses, that we owe our Perceptions of Pleasure.”82 In other words, the pleasure of the eye was in its imperfect grasp of skin’s heterogeneous nature—the subtlety that existed at vision’s threshold rather than the coarseness that lay beyond it. Engraving’s Dilemma In the context of these new ideas about, and interest in, skin’s subtle surface qualities, line engraving’s preeminence was called into question. In The Analysis of Beauty (1753), for exam- ple, the engraver William Hogarth (1697–1764)—while continuing to uphold line engrav- ing as the most accurate print process—concedes that mezzotints “come closest to nature, because they are done without strokes or lines.”83 This evaluation is echoed by William Gilpin (1724–1804), aesthetician and popularizer of the Picturesque, in his 1768 Essay Upon Prints. According to Gilpin, “that manner, which can give the best idea of the surface of an object, is the best.” Painting thus reigned supreme, but the “soft” mezzotint, despite its deficiencies in some respects, was privileged as the print process that could offer the “strongest representation of a surface [emphases in original].”84 Rather than denoting firmness or delib- eration, by “strongest” Gilpin seems to have meant something like the most believable representation of a surface, for he contrasted the mezzotint’s tonal repre- sentation to the “prejudices of cross lines, which exist on no natural bodies,” but which were required to represent those bodies’ topographies in both engraving and etching.85 Gilpin’s description of engraving’s hatching as prejudicial and unnatural resonates with Jefferson’s characterization of Black skin as an “immoveable veil” that creates a purportedly unnatural—that is to say, an expressionless—Black sub- 16 William Hogarth, Plate 2, from Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, London: Printed by J. ject. And in turn, Jefferson’s multivalent Reeves for the author..., 1753, engraving, evocation of skin as veil, which so aptly 163/4 × 21 in. (42.5 × 53.5 cm). Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of William Gray describes Wheatley’s engraved profile, from the collection of Francis Calley Gray recalls another, less well-known profile (artwork in the public domain; photograph © President and Fellows of Harvard College, by Hogarth (Figs. 16, 17). “Figure 95” is G1842) found on an illustrated plate tipped into 17 William Hogarth, Plate 2 (Fig. 16), detail The Analysis of Beauty, which Jefferson of “Figure 95.” Houghton Library, Harvard recommended as one of three aesthetic University, Cambridge, MA (artwork in the public domain; photograph © Houghton Library) treatises belonging in a gentleman’s library, and it accompanies the section of the text in which Hogarth discusses skin’s complex structure and its implications 78 The Art Bulletin June 2022 for artistic representation.86 An image at odds with itself, the sinuous, sketchy lines that outline the feminine profile of “Figure 95” jar against the web of thick, crosshatched lines that cover its cheek. These hatched lines are typical of the kinds of marks we see in line engraving (note their similarity to the hatching of the area just to the lower left of “Figure 95”), but in this instance they draw attention to themselves as lines, rather than providing illusionistic tone. Combined with his praise for mezzotint’s naturalism, Hogarth’s discussion of skin is illuminating because it reveals how line engraving both provided a model for Enlightenment understandings of skin’s structure and failed to adequately visualize its subtleties. As it hap- pens, the oddity of “Figure 95” lies not in the fact that its lines read diagrammatically (most of Hogarth’s figures are diagrams), but that its lines were meant to register imagistically. In the related section of the text, Hogarth describes new scientific theories of epidermal struc- ture and their implications for the artist’s handling of skin color. He privileges “flesh-colour” as an example of coloring that is both “distinctly varied and artfully united,” and for this rea- son identifies skin coloration as a preeminent yet worthwhile challenge for artistic represen- tation, arguing that it is precisely skin’s subtle coloring that “cause[s] the effect of beauty.”87 In order that his readers might better understand these principles and thereby achieve a fair representation of skin’s complex coloration, Hogarth provides a description of its struc- ture. Following contemporary anatomists like Cowper (elsewhere referred to in the Analysis as “the famous anatomist”), Hogarth asserts that the variety of corporeal complexions arises from the coloring of the cutis.88 In a proposal uniquely his own, however, the engraver sug- gests that “the different colored juices” are distributed across the cutis by “tender threads like a network,” with “different mashes” and “size of its threads in this or that part.”89 As with the famous “onion-skin” conceit of the Analysis’s introduction, it is suggestive that this proposal comes from an engraver, an artist whose success was founded on his ability to translate form into linear networks of varying patterns and densities.90 Even as the engraver’s technical background prompted a richer description of the cutis, the application of a fundamentally geometric system to corporeal matter introduced conceptual and representational difficulties. Both Hogarth’s explanation of “Figure 95,” which illustrates the way in which the cutis’s tender network produces a blush on a woman’s cheek, and the figure itself, struggle to make engraving fulfill this new aesthetic brief: A description of this manner of its shewing the rosy colour of the cheek, and in like manner, the bluish tints about the temple, etc. see in the profile [Figure 95], where you are to suppose the black strokes of the print to be the white threads of the net- work, and where the strokes are thickest, and the part blackest, you are to suppose the flesh would be whitest; so that the lighter part of it stands for the vermilion-co- lour of the cheek, gradating every way.91 In this passage and the accompanying figure, Hogarth sought to use engraving’s hatching convention—a system developed to describe the forms of things—to materialize an embod- ied system of variable coloration.92 This collapse of representational syntax creates a tortured series of reversals and conflations.93 The first, most obvious, problem is that “Figure 95” uses black lines to represent the “white” (or more accurately, transparent) threads of the epidermal network; the greatest density and thickness of the engraver’s marks thus paradoxically repre- sent the lightest parts of the depicted woman’s flesh. To be sure, there are some advantages to this schema: by doubling down on the significance of the engraved lines, Hogarth took advantage of their modeling logic. The curved lines that follow the contour of the figure’s cheek give the image a rudimentary but legible dimensionality, and the slightly wider spac- ing of the lines at the apex of the cheek reinforces this dimensionality by virtue of the fact 79 phillis wheatley’s portrait and the politics of technique  that lighter areas of hatching tend to be read as protruding toward the viewer. In order to achieve these effects and represent the “tender threads” as white lines, Hogarth would have had to adopt the inelegant and inefficient method of marking the spaces between the lines (as approximated by Fig. 18).94 Rather than do so, Hogarth maintained engraving’s status quo, forcing his reader to absorb the labor of “suppos- 18 William Hogarth, Plate 2 (Fig. 15), ing” the necessary reversals. detail of “Figure 95,” digitally inverted. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Practical considerations aside, a reversed Cambridge, MA (artwork in the public image would present Hogarth’s fair maiden as domain; photograph © Houghton Library) one whose skin at first appears to be black, an illusion only superficially ameliorated by the white lines of the cutis. Hogarth’s specific interest in the qualities of white skin is further suggested by the fact that he asks his reader to suppose that the “lighter part” of the network (that is, the less dense areas of the hatching) represents the “vermilion-colour of the cheek, gradating every way.” He was speaking, in other words, of a skin that was not only pale but highly variable. And in order to allude to both of these qualities, Hogarth needed his engraved lines to represent two different colors. In some parts of the print (“the part blackest”), the engraved lines indi- cate “white,” whereas in others (“the lighter part of it”), they shade to “vermilion.” As with the reversals described above, the engraver’s desire to depict a complex material reality—not only the structure of white skin’s tender network but also its variable appearance in time— exceeded his technique’s capacities, forcing him to place the burden of representation on his reader. Hogarth’s representational gymnastics reveal the difficulties that engraving posed for the new interest in white skin’s varied and variable appearance—an interest that was crucial to the increasingly fixed equation between beauty and European physiognomy that was drawn by British authors over the second half of the eighteenth century.95 Passages of the Analysis exemplify this discourse’s earlier manifestation, asserting that beauty’s highest expression is in the variable color of pale skin without fixing skin color to race. In other words, “white juice” might course through the network of a pale Englishwoman, but other skin tones are not nec- essarily indicators of a different race: the epidermal network of the Englishwoman’s brunette, or even simply sun-kissed, compatriot, might be filled with yellow or brownish-yellow fluid.96 Twenty years after the publication of Hogarth’s Analysis—and one year after the publication of Wheatley’s Poems—the poet, naturalist, and historian Oliver Goldsmith would take a signifi- cant step toward interlocking race and beauty in his History of the Earth (1774) by characteriz- ing the “fair complexion” of Europeans as being not only the most beautiful to the eye but also the “most advantageous” in serving as an index of a subject’s physical and moral state. By com- parison, Goldsmith asserted that while the more “settled shade[s]” of “the African black, and the Asiatic olive complexions” did sometimes “admit of their alterations also,” these changes were “neither so distinct, nor so visible,” and must therefore be seen as less becoming. Unlike Hogarth, Goldsmith labeled his colors with continental descriptors, thus explicitly linking “African” and “black,” “Asiatic” and “olive”—and by implication, “European” and “white.”97 In yet another generation, the Picturesque author Uvedale Price would deride the “absolute monotony” of Black skin in his attack on Sir Joshua Reynolds’s mid-century asser- tion that custom (i.e., learned preference), and not nature (i.e., universal principle), deter- mines the standards of beauty within a given culture.98 In a 1759 essay on the origin of ideas 80 The Art Bulletin June 2022 of beauty, Reynolds had notably used skin color to illustrate custom’s significance: “Custom alone,” he argued to an assumed European reader, “determines our preference of the color of the Europeans to the Ethiopians.” Whereas Reynolds had therefore posited that “custom makes, in a certain sense, white black and black white,” Price in 1801 argued for a fixed hier- archy in which white skin was absolutely more beautiful than Black.99 Price’s phrase “absolute monotony” is strikingly similar to Jefferson’s “eternal monotony,” and given that Notes on the State of Virginia was first published (anonymously) in Europe and enjoyed a wide circulation there, it is possible that Price’s rejection of the possibility of Black beauty derives in part from the earlier essay. With Jefferson and, shortly following him, Price, the distinction drawn between the expressiveness of pale skin and the purported muteness of Black skin became explicitly tied to projects of racial separation and hierarchization. Though it predates this explicitly racialized discourse, Hogarth’s floundering attempt to depict skin’s smooth yet variable appearance in “Figure 95” demonstrates the limits of engraving’s linear syntax for eighteenth-century viewers and offers a compelling reason as to why, over the second half of the century, line engraving was increasingly beset by tonal alter- natives. The earliest and most distinctive of these was the mezzotint engraving. While not a new process in Hogarth’s time, its popularity effloresced in the second half of the eighteenth century. The mezzotint’s “golden age” has generally been attributed to its commercial expe- diency and tonal representation, but in the context of the texts cited above, it is worth con- sidering how crucial its “softness” and perceived naturalism were to the portrayal of British whiteness.100 In contrast to engraving’s visual and material “veil,” the thick, burred surface of the mezzotint plate interacts with the print support in a more complex fashion that helps to materialize, as well as visualize, the soft depth and textural variations of skin and fabrics.101 Because of the large number of prints needed to fill a typical book edition, mezzo- tints’ fragility prevented them from becoming widely used for frontispiece portraits. Yet the importance of rendering white women as fair, luminous entities meant that, as we saw earlier, eighteenth-century engravers used a variety of strategies to dissolve, or at least lighten, engrav- ing’s veil. By including etched lines and/or by breaking and disrupting their engraved patterns, engravers used the white of the paper to illuminate the skin of their pale subjects (Figs. 10–12). Furthermore, because of the tendency to exaggerate the highlight across the forehead and, relatedly, to overdraw the contrast between illuminated face and dark, relatively undeveloped surroundings, these white authorial subjects often seem to be lit from within—thus emphasiz- ing the relationship between authorial and corporeal expression. To better achieve these effects, printmakers developed and embraced tonal print processes. By the time Wheatley’s portrait was published in 1773, the use of line engraving for author frontispieces had largely been replaced by stipple engraving, and both intaglio techniques would soon be overtaken by lithography.102 Thus far I have compared the print portrait of Wheatley, a Black woman, with print portraits of white female subjects. But even comparisons with other print portraits of Black subjects underscore the exceptional nature of her engraved representation.103 In contrast to the forcefully carved, regular lines that delineate Wheatley’s skin, the earlier portrait of the Muslim cleric Ayuba Suleiman Diallo (known as Job ben Solomon, ca. 1701–1773; portrait 1734) uses the freedom and delicacy of the chemically etched line to depict not only the detailed form of his face, but also the play of light across its surface (Fig. 19). Some fifty years later, the frontispieces of Wheatley’s contemporaries, the authors Ignatius Sancho (1729?– 1780) and Olaudah Equiano (ca. 1745–1797), were made, like most frontispiece portraits in the period, using the softer textures of stipple engraving (Figs. 20, 21).104 The use of stipple engraving not only renders their skin with a texture that suggests its porosity and variability but also, by simple technical equation with the stippled portraits of white authors, implies a 81 phillis wheatley’s portrait and the politics of technique basic similarity between Black and white bodies—a difference of degree, rather than kind.105 In both portraits of these Black male authors, moreover, the engravers applied a linear pat- tern to their stippled coats. This addition, which was common in both stipple and mezzotint engravings of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, serves not only to darken their outer garments but reiterates the harmonious correspondence between woven textiles and engraving’s linear syntax noted by Evelyn. Set in juxtaposition with this compounded mark, the merely stippled representations of Sancho’s and Equiano’s faces read as surfaces laid bare to the viewer—open books, so to speak, like the Bible held out by Equiano for our perusal.106 In contrast to the portraits of these other Black subjects, the engraved representation of Wheatley’s face holds uncompromisingly to its regular pattern. A minimal modeling is achieved by broadening the lines around the curve of her chin and the back of her neck, but there is little indication that the form of her face emerges in relation to an internal or external light. Just as Wheatley’s profile view refuses the possibility of a familiar connection between subject and viewer, the rendering of her skin draws an impassable barrier between the poet’s thoughts and their outward expression.107... The engraved portrait of Wheatley has often been characterized as the victim of technical naiveté or poor workmanship—a characterization that is fueled, I would argue, by viewers’ subtle discomfort with the politics of the image. Yet this apologetic interpretation is under- cut, as mentioned earlier, by the skill that the unidentified engraver brought to certain parts of the image: his simple but effective representation of the sheen of Wheatley’s sleeve, for example, and the subtle modeling of her kerchief and apron (see Fig. 1). By choosing to ren- der Wheatley’s skin in an uncompromising manner, the engraver made a portrait that invited viewers to reject the evidence of her authored words. Presented with the veil-like surface of Wheatley’s engraved skin, white viewers like Jefferson were confirmed and encouraged in their belief that Black persons were biologically different from, and inferior to, white persons. In this regard, Wheatley’s engraved portrait enacts a foundational dynamic by which anti- slavery imagery often simultaneously acknowledges and denies the humanity of its subjects. However, it is also worth considering the possibility that the very obscuration of Wheatley’s subjectivity served to safeguard it. Throughout this essay I have interpreted the Wheatley frontispiece as a product of eighteenth-century white British culture, which sought to deprecate the “immoveable veil” of Black skin. In the twenty-first century, however, we can confront this discursive and aesthetic inheritance. We can experience the portrait differ- ently: not only because we have learned (and are still learning) to value its subject and the subtlety of her writing, but also because we have been taught by Édouard Glissant to rec- ognize the right to, and power of, opacity, and, by theorists of the surface, to look at rather than through.108 These authors remind us that demanding transparency or mining the inner “truth” of a thing, person, or idea, exerts its own kind of violence, and they invite us to adopt a different model of relationality—one that accepts, even revels in, what can be experienced at the surface. In making this proposal I want to be clear that I am not minimizing the racist implications of the frontispiece’s engraved surface, which, as I have argued, have significantly impacted Wheatley’s reception and further point to larger structural problems in Western art’s portrayal of Black subjects. Yet I also affirm, as I think many of the readers of this essay might, that works can exceed the time and place, and also the politics, of their making. In contrast to her Black and white authorial counterparts, Wheatley makes no over- ture to the viewer. Her gaze is directed inward, her written lines indecipherable. And yet, 82 The Art Bulletin June 2022 19 William Hoare, Job, Son of Solliman Dgiallo, High Priest of Bonda in the Country of Foota, Africa, detail, 1734, etching, 9 × 61/8 in. (22.8 × 15.6 cm). Royal Museums Greenwich, London (artwork in the public domain; photograph © Royal Museums Greenwich) 20 Francesco Bartolozzi after Thomas Gainsborough, Ignatius Sancho, 1781, from Sancho, Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, London: Printed by J. Nicols, 1782, frontispiece, stipple engraving, 7 × 45/8 in. (17.9 × 11.9 cm). Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (artwork in the public domain; photograph © Houghton Library) 21 Daniel Orme after W. Denton, Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, 1789, from Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Dublin: Printed for the author, 1791, frontispiece, stipple engraving, 61/8 × 33/4 in. (15.6 × 9.5 cm). National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC) 83 phillis wheatley’s portrait and the politics of technique the notion that these compositional choices make Wheatley more passive, more available to our piercing gaze, is repudiated by the systematic cross-hatching of her skin, whose dense, regular lines form a kind of armor, a delicate yet impenetrable chainmail. Unlike the punctu- ating marks left by a stipple roulette or mezzotint rocker, the raised lines of the engraving sit lightly on the surface of the page. The asymmetrical cross-hatching, with one set of parallel lines more pronounced than the other,