Yinka Shonibare and Thomas Gainsborough: A Conversation

In Gainsborough's painting from about 1750, a richly dressed husband and wife pose in front of their Suffolk estate. In Yinka Shonibare's 1998 version, they have no heads and no land, and their clothes are made of West African Dutch wax cloth.

It is those two works in Room 1, the H J Hyams Room, together for the first time to mark 300 years since Gainsborough's birth. You walk in to the painting alone on one wall and the life-sized couple across the room, with empty space where the fields should be. Shonibare first saw the painting at art college and picked it, he says, as "an icon of Britishness". The missing heads point to the executions of the French Revolution, and the cloth to the colonial trade that ran through 18th-century Britain.

Rosie Millard called it "a lovely, short experience". One blogger found the headless pair "threatening and stressful" rather than playful, and was alone in the room at noon. It's free, just inside the main entrance.