The opening room stuns: a circle of magnificent 18th-century portraits hanging spotlit in a darkened rotunda. Ignatius Sancho, actor, writer, composer, the first man of African descent to vote in Britain, speech still quick upon his lips, sits for Thomas Gainsborough in Bath. A young man, half-smiling, but with care on his brow, poses for John Singleton Copley in London. Francis Barber, servant and cherished companion to Samuel Johnson, holds his beautiful head high in Joshua Reynolds’s Leicester Square studio. Barber will be Dr Johnson’s heir.
Every sitter in every great painting is Black (including Kerry James Marshall’s contemporary imagining of Scipio Moorhead, an enslaved African American artist whose life and work are known only through the fleeting praise of a 1773 poem). A whole gallery of Black subjects: this has never happened at the Royal Academy before. It is an ideal start to the most dramatic, enthralling and radical exhibition to jolt the RA out of its 256-year history.
