Here is an exhibition full of things that Europeans have not just forgotten: we didn’t know about them in the first place. Ask for a list of leading American-born artists active in the 1920s and 1930s, and most of us are going to get stuck after Edward Hopper, Norman Rockwell and whoever-it-was who painted “American Gothic” (that was Grant Wood).

The reason for this widespread cluelessness is that European galleries, although flush with paintings by Lichtenstein, Warhol and Rauschenberg, are almost destitute of American art from the previous generation. Indeed, the British Museum’s print room is probably the premier assemblage outside America of work by the likes of Wood, William Zorach, Blanche Lazell, Louis Lozowick, Milton Avery (“the American Matisse”), Thomas Hart Benton (the early master of Jackson Pollock) and the “citizen artist” Benton Spruance. So a show drawn entirely from that collection is a valuable learning opportunity. It also happens to be a great pleasure.