Poynter's famous painting depicts Andromeda as a white woman despite her being explicitly Ethiopian in the myth.
I understand that to the Greeks, Aethiopia didn't refer to the modern day country of Ethiopia but rather some vague ill defined region of Africa.
Was Poynter's painting simply 'whitewashing'? Was Andromeda actually black?
PS. I did do some research for myself into this topic but it seems this question is very controversial and quite politicized so it's difficult to cut through the bias.
No extant ancient source pays any attention to her skin colour at all. The same applies to her parents.
I know nothing about Poynter, but I presume s/he was simply operating under a white-o-centric presumption of "not identified" = "white".
No mythical source draws any obvious racial distinctions between the legendary Aithiopes and anyone else. Originally the Aithiopes were a legendary people who lived near the rising and setting of the sun, by the farthest shores of the earth; but the Greeks equated this mythical people with the inhabitants of modern Ethiopia fairly early on (6th century BCE onwards).
For what it's worth, in the Homeric Odyssey (7th cent. BCE), one character cites the Aithiopian leader Memnon as a paradigm of great beauty, when he says that Achilleus' son was "the most beautiful I ever saw, after divine Memnon" (Od. 11.522). And in a similar vein, Andromeda's mother Kassiopeia, the Aithiopian queen, boasted that she was more beautiful than the Nereids (divine daughters of the sea god Nereus). Andromeda's father Kepheus was supposedly immortalised as the constellation Cepheus.
But there are no obvious racial subtexts of any kind in the passages describing these fictional events (at least not as far as I've checked), nor in any other early passage referring to the Aithiopes. Ancient Greco-Romans weren't terribly interested in skin colour.