One might as well begin with this painting.

In this image, we see two women of status, Dido Elizabeth Belle alongside her cousin, white Lady Elizabeth Murray. It is an oil portrait from 1779. I’m no art historian, but I can tell you that the image communicated an intimacy and nod towards an equality in social status that I hadn’t seen in European paintings of dark skinned peoples from the medieval through to the Victorian period. A great Tumblr, People of Color in European Art History has collected a host of images and in most of them, the darker body is subordinate to the lighter body. While Murray assumes considerable real estate in the foreground ...