The trouble with Tate Britain

Tate Britain has had a facelift. The gallery describes its ‘rehang’, unveiled in May, as a chance for visitors to ‘discover over 800 works by over 350 artists spanning six centuries’. Unfortunately, Tate Britain’s painful historical sensitivity – and its selective amnesia – make it difficult to enjoy the artwork.

The gallery’s Room 6, ‘Revolution and Reform 1776-1833’, provides one of the most egregious examples. A frieze around the walls is accompanied by a chronology of the period that ends: ‘1833. Slavery is abolished in Britain’.

I kept looking up, imagining my eyes were deceiving me. In 1833, there had been no slaves in Britain for years. In 1772 and 1778, the Somerset and Knight cases, in the English and Scottish courts respectively, had established what had been understood for generations: that no person could be legally held as a slave in Britain. In 1833, of course, Parliament passed an ‘Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British colonies’.