Entangled Pasts 1768-Now review – RA all at sea with its risk-light colonial revisionism

Woman overboard … Kara Walker’s no world, an etching from the series An Unpeopled Land in Uncharted Waters, 2010. Photograph: © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. and Sprüth Magers

An affable and portly 18th-century gentleman in a fine red waistcoat, his cheeks flushed with mirth and eyes registering a delicate intelligence, sits comfortably for his portrait by Thomas Gainsborough. All is as it should be, apart from one small detail: the sitter is black.

This familiar portrait is placed as a gentle entrée to the Royal Academy’s Entangled Pasts. Arranged in three sections – Sites of Power, Beauty and Difference, Crossing Waters – the RA’s exhibition attempts to reflect how “art has collided with [the British] empire, enslavement, resistance, abolition and indenture”. Depicting Charles Ignatius Sancho, the portrait was completed in 1768, the year the Royal Academy was founded. The portrayal of this renowned “African Man of Letters” is atypically sympathetic for its time. He is not racialised: he is an individual whose character is sensitively captured.