Unframed Women: Visibility and Power at the National Portrait Gallery

About this tour

Behind every portrait lies a hierarchy. This tour centres women who led, resisted, created, and shaped Britain—yet remain underrepresented on the walls. A focused look at visibility, power, and the stories museums underplay.

What you'll hear

1. 1

   Stop 1: Welcome to the National Portrait Gallery

   An orientation to the National Portrait Gallery that frames portraiture as a map of power, introducing how feminist art history reveals the presences, absences, and structural barriers shaping women’s representation from the sixteenth century to today.

2. 2

   Stop 2: Women and Power in the Tudor Court

   How royal portraiture turned queens and noblewomen into instruments of dynasty, obedience, and political display. ⏯️ Tudor Galleries — Floor 3, Room 1

3. 3

   Stop 3: Virtue and Silence

   The early-modern portrait as moral lesson: femininity scripted through modesty, piety, and tightly controlled visibility. ⏯️ Stuart & Seventeenth-Century Galleries — Floor 3, Room 4

4. 4

   Stop 4: The Invention of Feminine Beauty

   Sensibility, whiteness, and imperial refinement: the 18th century’s carefully crafted ideal of womanhood. ⏯️ Georgian & Enlightenment Galleries — Floor 3, Room 7

5. 5

   Stop 5: Victorian Womanhood in Public

   Respectability, reform, and empire: how portraiture moralised women’s public roles and anxieties about modernity. ⏯️ Victorian Galleries — Floor 2, Room 19

6. 6

   Stop 6: Women at Work

   Citizenship reshaped by war and modernity: portraits of nurses, factory workers, artists, and professionals rewriting authority. ⏯️ Early 20th-Century Galleries — Floor 2, Room 25

7. 7

   Stop 7: Race, Diaspora, and Belonging

   Black and Brown British women confront the gaze: portraits that unsettle who is seen, who belongs, and who defines “Britishness.” ⏯️ Postwar & Modern Galleries — Floor 2

8. 8

   Stop 8: Feminist Interventions

   The portrait disrupted: self-representation through fragmentation, humour, and refusal of the idealised feminine form. ⏯️ Contemporary Galleries — Floor 1, Weston Wing

9. 9

   Stop 9: Intersectional Futures

   Queer, trans, and diasporic subjects remaking the canon: portraits that imagine new forms of identity, kinship, and recognition. ⏯️ Contemporary Galleries — Floor 1, Weston Wing

10. 10

    Last Stop: Back Where We Started

    Heading back to the entrance and reflecting on what we've learnt. ⏯️ Gallery entrance — Floor 0