In 2019 in the early stages of planning the exhibition Invisible Portraits, Ash visited the Gallery’s store to unearth the ‘hidden’ contribution that LGBTIQ+ artists in particular have made to our collective artistic heritage. She found a strong overlap between artists who had shaped her own work and those in the collection. She knew many of these were artists who had led difficult lives and struggled because of their sexuality, unable to openly paint the subject matter they really wanted to. Homosexuality was a criminal act only partially decriminalised in 1967, so the fear of being outed and ending up in jail was very real. Their public and private lives were necessarily kept very separate.

Keith Vaughan hid his ‘Erotic Fantasies 1940–60’ in his studio. Duncan Grant gave a folder marked ‘these drawings are very private’ to his friend Edward le Bas in 1959. It held over 400 erotic works on paper. Subsequently, they were secretly passed through gay succession down the generations. They emerged from under a bed in 2020 and were donated to Charleston.