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Lubaina Himid's 2018 installation Naming the Money at the Walker Art Gallery flanked William Hogarth's 1745 Portrait of David Garrick with two of her painted and cut-out figures, a priestess and an artist. These women declare their names and recall their lives in short poems affixed to wall labels. While they are imagined figures, they evoke historical Black women who lived in the British Isles in growing numbers over the course of the eighteenth century.1 Himid's imagined encounter conjures but does not recount history, though Garrick knew Black Britons living in eighteenth-century London.2 The actor very likely knew of Dido Elizabeth Davinier (c.1760/1–1804, née Belle), and he may have met her at Kenwood House, the estate of his friend William Murray, Lord Mansfield, Dido's guardian and great-uncle. Garrick presumably had other unrecorded meetings with people of African descent, for example, in the households and studios of the sculptor Joseph Nollekens or Sir Joshua Reynolds, both of whom had Black servants, and both of whom portrayed him. And, living in London, he would have seen or been served by Black men and women and socialized with the Caribbean-born children of British plantation owners and women of African descent. The failure to note these encounters was not unusual for the period; as a result, there is more work to be done in uncovering these histories. Black British women artists, including Himid, have actively endeavored to see historical women of African descent. Amma Asante's film Belle (2013), the novels of Zadie Smith, and the photographs of Maud Sulter engage the lives and histories of Black women, often relating historical women to women in the present day, fashioning a genealogy that predates the 1948 arrival of the Windrush generation. Despite this rich artistic engagement, much about the social and historical context of these women's lives remains unknown. Much of the literature that recounts the history of Afro-Britons focuses on men both due to their greater numbers and because of the greater abundance of written and visual records that document them. This record is itself a gendered phenomenon that reflects contemporary attitudes and shaped the lives of Black women, as I will address below. The elision of their presence in the past has contributed to "gaps in...





