By Jayati Ghose
London, Feb 3 (.) Portraiture is never neutral. Whether painted or photographed, it encases a visible likeness within a frame for public view, a process shaped by what is shown, what is withheld, and what is permitted to stand in for a life.
Portrait galleries, therefore, offer more than faces and names. They preserve a record of how societies have chosen to frame women across time, what has been emphasised, what softened, and what quietly left out.
At London’s National Portrait Gallery, this dynamic becomes especially pronounced. Portraiture here is not merely about likeness, but about calculation: how a woman was seen by her society, how she may have understood herself, and how she chose — or was compelled — to be portrayed by others.
This essay focuses on women because their relationship to visibility has historically been narrower, more conditional, and more closely policed.
One of the clearest illustrations is Ada Lovelace. Celebrated today as a foundational figure in computing, she was painted in 1836 as society then knew how to recognise her: draped in silk, elegant and composed, without a single object to suggest intellectual labour.
Her most significant contribution came years later. In 1843, in notes appended to her translation of Luigi Menabrea’s paper on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, Lovelace described a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers — what Encyclopaedia Britannica describes as the first computer program, an algorithm designed to be carried out by a machine.
The irony is not that her brilliance was ignored, but that the visual record of her life was fixed before her work could become legible. The frame was set early, unable to anticipate the mind history would later discover.
To read these portraits only as evidence of limitation, however, would be incomplete. Within narrow frames, many women made precise, knowing decisions about portrayal — sometimes by working within convention, sometimes by rejecting it altogether.
That intention sharpens in the work of Lee Miller.
Known first as a fashion model, she refused to remain the object of the gaze. During the Second World War, she became a war correspondent for British Vogue and documented the liberation of Paris and the concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald.
Where traditional portraiture asked women to be legible, Miller made legibility her instrument. She stepped behind the lens and kept it there.
This shift in power is concentrated in a single photograph: Jam Session at the Local, taken by Miller and published in Vogue in August 1944.
Its centre belongs to the cartoonist Carl Giles, laughing at a piano among American troops. But the eye drifts to the edge, where his wife, Sylvia Joan Clarke, stands watching — included but not centred, visible but not addressed.
Clarke appears within the frame yet remains peripheral. Miller disappears from view because she controls it. The difference is not between subject and observer, but between accommodation and authorship.
Respectability, in portraits, often emerges not merely as constraint but as strategy — one of the few tools women could wield without penalty.
Few understood the economics of visibility more sharply than Kitty Fisher, courtesan and muse in 18th-century Britain, whose social position depended on being seen.
Portraits were expensive and uncommon for women of Fisher’s background, yet she sat for several — including works by Sir Joshua Reynolds — ensuring her image circulated among elite social circles.
The significance of Fisher’s portrait lies in control. She did not merely occupy the frame; she commissioned it, curated it, and multiplied it. What might have been fleeting was made durable.
Some women went further, refusing to treat the frame as fate.
Lady Colin Campbell offers a different kind of negotiation: not the quiet calculus of survival, but the deliberate acceptance of consequence.
In late 19th-century Britain, she became infamous through one of the most sensational divorce trials of the era — a public spectacle in a society that demanded female silence as the price of belonging.
Her portrait does not read as defeat. It reads as a refusal. She took the frame she was given and rattled it until it rang.
Read this way, portraiture becomes more than a historical ledger of power. It becomes a record of women thinking ahead — about influence, legibility, and legacy.
Their freedoms were uneven, their risks unequal, and the costs of defiance rarely predictable. Yet across centuries, portraits reveal a recurring intelligence: a clear-eyed understanding of how visibility works, and when to comply, redirect, or resist its terms.
In the end, the question is not whether a woman was framed accurately, but whether the frame carried her intention — or erased it.
(Jayati Ghose is an entrepreneur and former journalist. The views expressed are personal.)
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