Auntie’s Best Bonnet refers to the 1890 play Hedda Gabler by playwright Henrik Ibsen. Offor was familiar with the play, performed in London during the 1890s-1900s. Hedda is a young woman dissatisfied with her new husband and family home. Early in the play Hedda suggests her husband’s aunt’s new hat is cheap and unattractive, revealing her contempt. Hedda tries to rekindle a relationship with a former lover, engaging in talk behind a photograph album, while her husband is in the room. This painting shows Hedda with her photograph album. Her stern gaze suggests frustration and disappointment with her new identity as a married woman. The painting is not of a specific actor but is reminiscent of how the character was presented at the time.

Eagle Cottage stood in a row of houses set back from Hornsey High Street. In 1926 the Brooks family lived here. The artist Katherine Cornish was an art teacher. The 21-year-old Katherine won a Brightwen Scholarship to The Royal Female School of Art for “young women of the middle class to obtain an honourable and profitable employment”. Her brother Edwin was an illustrator in Crouch End. His life is easier to trace through records, but it is harder to find Katherine. The unmarried Cornish sisters were professionals but may not have owned property. Their move to Crouch End coincided with the 1918 Representation of the People Act, the first time some women over 30 could vote. We don’t know their views, but it is possible they could not vote.

In 1955 Violet Fuller wrote, ‘I have lived in Tottenham nearly all my life. 1920s Tottenham still had fields. I remember going over a stile to get to Belmont School. The stile was at the top of Downhills Park near this old water tower. About 1936 I attended Hornsey School of Art on a scholarship. I stayed until 1940 when our house was damaged during an air raid. We went to Gloucestershire, the start of my painting landscapes. Working as a tracer in animation films, the early 1950s was an exciting time in London. Many things were getting going. New groups formed. I was the founder member of the Free Painters and Sculptors in 1952 and Tottenham Art Group in 1953.’ Several solo shows followed. Her landscapes were even used commercially.

This portrait shows the children of Henry and Lady Constantia with their African servant. The setting alludes to an allegorical hunting scene, but this young man was likely a member of the Bruce Castle household. With no known name, he is dressed in opulent clothing. Around his neck is a silver collar. The painting is a poignant and stark indication of Britain’s entrenchment in the transatlantic slave trade. It is one of fifty similar images painted in Britain between 1660 and 1760. In 2007 the Museum worked with visual orator Akosua Bambara and elders from Haringey University of the Third Age to explore and better understand the painting and to make transparent its complex history. The painting is displayed alongside the resulting artwork.

'I was born in Jamaica and came to England in 1959. It was to be for four years to be a nurse. Over 60 years on and a career in Early Years and nurseries, I am still living here. [...] I retired, went to Tottenham technical college and created my painting. I wanted as much of my character in the portrait. A self-made individual woman. I wear bright colours often topped with a hat. But no hat here. I wanted lots of spikes, my hallmark reddish-purple hair colour recognisable as ‘rebel Ruth’, my activism. I used colours of my family home of Jamaica, green and yellow. Blue remembers my best friend. We spoke each day. I miss him enormously. When it comes to another dear friend, my local museum, I wanted to give my portrait. A likkle bit of me.'