The National Portrait Gallery's bizarre obsession with slavery

The movement to radicalise the art and museum world was always going to come back and bite its own children. It has happened more quickly than we thought, as demonstrated by the seriously red faces at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) last week.

Among the paintings on display at the NPG was one by French society artist James Tissot of Edward Fox-White, a well-known British 19th century art dealer who opened his first gallery in Glasgow in 1854. Last year, Donald Gajadhar, a descendant of Fox-White’s and manager of the art appraisal business founded by him, noticed a statement in the gallery’s notes next to the picture of his great-great-grandfather. This stated baldly that Fox-White’s father-in-law Moses Gomes Silva, a Jamaica planter, had set him up in business from the something under £400 compensation that he had received following the abolition of slavery.