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It's usually modern art that aims to overturn preconceptions, but a new show of 19th century paintings delivers more shocks than Tracey Emin. One revelation is embedded in the title — "Black Victorians: Black People in British Art 1800-1900." The very concept of "black Victorians" may surprise. There had, of course, been Africans in Britain long before Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, but in the 19th century they were a familiar sight — not that you'd know that from most accounts of the old Queen's reign. Yet the show's curator, Jan Marsh, discovered that Victorian art depicted many black subjects — not only servants, but also soldiers, sailors, actors, musicians and pugilists. "I began to look more systematically and discovered hundreds [of these images]," she says. "It both reveals Victorian art as not as white as we imagine, but also Victorian society as not as white as we imagine."

The fruits of Marsh's research are on display at Manchester Art Gallery until Jan. 8, and then at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (Jan. 28-April 2). As well as paintings, there are cartoons, ads and photographs of characters like Sarah Forbes Bonetta, a captive from Dahomey who became the Queen's godchild. Many of the images were designed to serve a purpose: to moralize, to glorify the empire or even to sell soap. Some propagandize for or against slavery. François-Auguste Biard's The Slave Trade (1835) is a grand narrative of cruelty. On the right people arrive bound; they're examined and haggled over; they proceed across the canvas to be flogged onboard the boat that will carry them to the slave ship offshore. Eyre Crowe's Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond Virginia (1861), is less overt in its condemnation of the trade. Composed from a sketch of a real slave market, it shows neatly dressed women and children sitting on a bench. The normality of the scene — one of the women is even smiling — packs a punch. A contemporary critic claimed "the appalling guilt of that accursed system was never more successfully depicted."

However progressive that message may have seemed at the time, the picture portrays its black subjects in circumstances viewers then and now would expect. These assumptions are challenged, however, by the show's introductory section, in which black people feature as part of ordinary life, in street scenes or fighting alongside white comrades. Of course, many black Victorians did still occupy subordinate positions. In Thomas Faed's Visit to the Village School (1852), set in Scotland, a local bigwig and his wife listen to the youngest students reading, while some of the older pupils taunt their young black servant.

Such story pictures were put together from studies of professional models. Jamaican-born Fanny Eaton often turns up in the background of biblical subjects, but later in the century black models appeared on the losing side in topical battle pictures. Prints like Lts Coghill and Melville Saving the Colours, Zulu War, 1879 (1882), after Adolphe Alphonse de Neuville, may look stagey to us, but even back then not everyone found them convincing. A critic commented: "[We see] the ordinary Parisian negro-models, reproduced in more or less warlike attitudes." Many painters became interested in their models' own stories. A section called "Into and Out of Africa" reveals how travelers and scientists, recording physical types and costumes, also observed the humanity of their subjects. David Wilkie's Negro Nurse with White Baby (1840-01) is a tender sketch of a woman embracing her charge.

For the most part, Victorian society was one in which most thought black people inferior. Yet Marsh observes: "Although Victorian society was racist through and through, this is not reflected in the art." The exception — and the most disturbing section of the exhibition — parades a series of cartoons and advertisements that saw a crude humor in black caricatures. Marsh was persuaded to include these by black colleagues, who "insisted that negative imagery be included." A disclaimer by this display reads: "[To give] an entirely positive view would be to rewrite history the way we would like it to have taken place." Lest we forget; it did not.

• LUCY FISHER / Manchester
• A new exhibition of 19th century art reveals a Britain more diverse than many history books suggest