Primary Source 17.5: Mulatto Painting

The caption in the upper left-hand corner of this mid-eighteenth-century painting identifies the family as being composed of a Spanish father and a black mother, whose child is described as “mulatto.” The painting was number six in a series of sixteen images by the painter Jose de Alcibar, each showing a different racial and ethnic combination. The series belonged to a popular genre in the Spanish Americas known as castas paintings, which commonly depicted sixteen different forms of racial mixing.

image
(Francisco Clapera, De Espanol, y Negra, Mulato, c. 1785. Denver Art Museum Collection. Gift of Frederick and Jan Mayer, 2011.428.4. © Denver Art Museum.)

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