In a room called “identity”, 18th-century portraits by William Hogarth of a wealthy merchant family are going back on display. But now they will share space at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge with a subversive contemporary portrait by Black British artist Joy Labinjo, that imagines 18th-century African abolitionist Olaudah Equiano and his mixed-race family.
In another room, labelled “interiors”, Ethel Walker’s 1916 painting Silence of the Ravine – thought to be the earliest female nude painted by an openly lesbian artist in the UK – is waiting to be exhibited for the first time. Nearby, a wall of paintings dating from the 1720s to the 1920s all depict the same activity, once thought to be scandalous and unnatural: women reading.
