Redisplaying a room that is dedicated to pre-1600 works heavy on Christian iconography takes some thinking when your aim is to make it accessible to the residents of Birmingham, one of the most ethnically diverse communities in Britain. ‘The walkthrough is a Western European narrative, with many gaps and problems,’ Powell tells me as we amble through the galleries ahead of the reopening. ‘For a long time the Barber’s collecting was done in a purist “connoisseurial” way. The fact that there seems to be one single lens here is quite problematic – and the way it presents the idea of “masterpieces”, with that very male sense.’

At the Barber, that very male sense can be hard to escape. Only four of the paintings in a 152-strong collection are by women. The first of these to have been acquired remains by some distance the most memorable: a startlingly direct portrait of the Countess Golovina, all smiling candour, by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1797/1800). It was purchased by Hamish Miles, the Institute’s third director, in 1980.Works on paper aside, the three successive women directors have not acquired many more pieces by women between them. Kalinsky made some headway here – one of the last works she purchased was Maria Tassaert’s Still Life with a Garland of Fruit (c. 1660s), with its rutilant cherries and luminous grapes – but Powell sees lifting that torch as a key part of her mission. ‘We need to go further,’ she says, a note of urgency in her voice. ‘We have to move that forward.’