Artist Lela Harris and historian Imogen Tyler discuss the six paintings Lela created for the ‘Facing the Past Project’ that sees imagined portraits of known Black Lancastrians hanging in the Judges’ Lodgings Museum alongside portraits of prominent eighteenth-century Lancastrians involved in the Atlantic trade in enslaved people.

In 2022 Lela Harris was commissioned by The Judges’ Lodgings Museum to create a set of portraits of real Black individuals from Lancaster’s history whose given names alone we know.

The discussion reveals how much care and thought went into the creation of the portraits, despite the challenge of creating paintings without benefit of any visual references, using only contemporary written sources such as descriptions in contemporary advertisements for ‘runaways’ escaping enslavement.