On closing her four-venue European travelling show at Tate Britain in February, Yiadom-Boakye was confirmed as one of Britain’s foremost painters, leaving critics enamoured with her oil paintings of timeless figures – all Black, some posed, some acting out everyday playful scenes. ‘A living old master’, The Guardian reckoned. ‘Her touch is sublime. She animates a face with a few marks and patches of bare canvas,’ commented the Evening Standard. ‘[A] very, very good painter. Thick and rough with the brush but just precise enough,’ thought Time Out. Ever prolific, she went on in March to fill the Guggenheim Bilbao with a selection of over 70 paintings and charcoal drawings, all shown for the first time and made in the last three years. Being one of the leading practitioners of Black figuration comes with commercial success too: her 2015 painting Six Birds in the Bush, a portrait of a young Black man sporting a purple feather in his hat and who appears as though caught in a daydream, sold for £2.95m at Sotheby’s in October.