“With portraiture there is a point of contact, a way of touching another’s life acknowledging not just what they look like, but what they are like. I have been lucky to enrich my own thinking and awareness through working with the people I have wanted to paint. Areas of philosophy, religion, psychological perspectives, poetry, art, women’s roles and the inner life are key issues for me, and all have been nurtured by the minds and spirits that I have met through portraiture.”

“Among the finest works acquired by London’s and Edinburgh’s National Portrait Galleries since the 1980s are Victoria Crowe’s sympathetically curious, vigorous, painterly portraits: psychologically acute likenesses of friends including psychiatrist RD Laing and actor Graham Crowden, and above all thoughtful, richly allusive depictions of powerful, elderly women. Haematologist Dame Janet Vaughan in tweed and silk fixes us with a fiercely intelligent, penetrating gaze: a formidable, wise presence softened by domestic details of delicate china and books whose titles evoke Bloomsbury – Vaughan was Virginia Woolf’s cousin and the resemblance is striking. ‘Kathleen Raine’, by contrast, is uneasy: a charged portrait of the poet troubled by past and present, eyes averted, crimson coat set against a silvery baroque mirror reflecting images and texts from Raine’s life. Composer Thea Musgrave, expression fluid, open, optimistic, poses by a mysterious blue stage evoking her operas. Psychoanalyst Winifred Rushforth, painted aged 96, is back-illuminated and silhouetted alongside a screaming Bushman sculpture; light half falling on her strong features suggests thresholds between inner and external worlds. Such portraits, grave, individual, imbued with spiritual grace, say nothing direct about gender politics but taken together marvellously record societal progress of women pioneers in fields from science to music.”