The painted ladies

Powerful women — whether their influence comes from sex, money, marriage, politics or all four — have a hard time reputation-wise. They are viragos, seductresses, demonic plotters, enchantresses and witches. They are mad or "unnatural", or both. Rumours abound; gossip swirls; entire careers get reduced to one-liners. Catherine II of Russia, known as Catherine the Great, is remembered for supposedly having relations with a horse, not for her impressive grasp of foreign policy (and the rest).

Sometimes the gossip is not merely career-threatening, but life-ending: Anne Boleyn, a towering figure who helped bring about England's seismic parting from Rome, was beheaded because she supposedly slept with her own brother — a better excuse than simply being too clever by half. Courtesans, often intelligent and ambitious women using the oldest short cut to power available to them at the time, are merely "whores". And those women who do manage to get into positions of real power, through accident of birth or marriage, are eternally, restlessly looking over their shoulders; ever at the mercy of a male-decreed killing, incarceration or — for the lucky ones — exile to a nunnery.

Alice Instone, whose exhibition opens today in Soho, has painted a series of modern subjects — myself included — in the poses of notorious historical females. She has been drawing women since she was little: "I think there may have been some link in my mind between the perfect female exterior and gaining some kind of control," she says. "Clearly I'm still obsessed by the relationship between gender and power, but it's also about femininity, beauty and female sexuality. I've always been drawn to the bad' woman, seductresses and the sort of women who seemed to have lots of power."

The life stories of the women she has chosen to portray send shudders down the spine. It is worth remembering that the indignities visited on them only affect us because they are, in the early part of the 21st century, still so resonant. Sex and scandal, the cutting down to size, the mocking of appearance, the relentless desire of society to pack women into neat little boxes — and, of course, the bizarre need to "punish" every woman who's no better than she should be.
The women in Instone's paintings paid the highest price for their "transgressions". We don't have to, and the very least we can do is raise a glass to them in all their bad, wild, brave, magnificent glory.

The House of Fallen Women, including portraits of Emma Freud (above, as Emma, Lady Hamilton) and India Knight (below, as Catherine de Medici) is at Quintessentially Soho, 1 Greek Street, W1.

Mon-Fri 9am-noon, Sat 4.30pm-7pm or by appointment (020 7183 3900). Until November 12.