Walking in to the latest major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, you are greeted by the cool, self-possessed gaze of Sofonisba Anguissola, the artist and the subject. She has taken for herself the role of St Luke the evangelist in painting the “first” portrait of the Virgin Mary. Then you look at the caption, and find this was painted in 1556.

It is not just the quality of the work here that surprises, but that a woman should be granted such a prominent place, so early. But as you proceed through Self Portrait: Renaissance to Contemporary, at every point it is the female artists who stand out. Of the 56 diverse paintings here, a quarter are by women – a surprisingly large percentage for a show covering such a time frame.

The curators suggest that the self-portrait particularly appealed to women artists because they were compensating for their lack of access to models, and taking one of the few avenues available to them for self-promotion. Both statements are undoubtedly true, but it also seems that these factors were not so great a disadvantages as they might seem, at least in the specialist area of the self portrait. The women, being forced to look inward, to analyse and argue for their professional status, produced powerful paintings that have a lot to say.
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Historical memory is a fickle thing. Look at London. The Roman city has always loomed large, but Anglo-Saxon London – or rather Lundenwic (c. 600-886) – was forgotten. For centuries, scholars scoffed at Bede’s description of a thriving trading centre. It has only been in the past two decades that archaeologists have found what he described, a large, rich settlement in the area that is now Soho and Charing Cross.

It is thus apt that the Museum of London should decide to revamp its medieval gallery now, when some sense has been made of the glorious finds. The new display – which contrary to its name covers more than a thousand years, nearly half the city’s history – was opened last week, and was worth the wait.

The Museum is well known for its accessible presentations, and the new gallery fits the mould, although with fewer reconstructions than its justly celebrated Roman displays. In presenting the newly rediscovered Ludenwic in particular, for which there is so little other information, the history has to be “read” from the objects found. These might have been what were once called the “Dark Ages”, but beautiful things were still celebrated and sought after.
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“What do women WANT?” It is a classic question asked by an anti-feminist bloke, usually with a stagey layer of overlaid sarcasm, implying that half of the human race is unreasonable and impossible to satisfy. And if they are unhappy, it is neither this man’s fault, nor any other man’s.

The Women’s Library has the perfect answer, in its exhibition titled simply What Do Women Want?” Drawn entirely from its collections, covering a span of around 150 years, it comes to the conclusion that women over that time have wanted broadly the same things – access to decisionmaking in public and private spheres, safety, opportunity, respect …. and they’ve had to keep fighting for them, because they have often not been delivered until decades of campaigning, and even when delivered, they’ve been continually under threat.
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The introduction to Samuel Palmer: Vision and Landscape describes the artist as “one of Britain’s greatest painters”. Certainly a couple of his works are among of the nation’s most reproduced. And this exhibition, which traces his entire career, suggests that “one of the most talented” would be a fair label. Overall, however, what is on display is a talent dissipated by the pressures of Victorian life.

The British Museum exhibition traces in detail not just his work, but his curiously modern life. A self-portrait at the age of about 19 shows a soulful young man, far too serious for his age. A Romantic, destined to die young, you would think. Yet his work at this time is conventional, picturesque landscape – one watercolors closely resembling a painting manual’s model. (Echoes of the Vettriano controversy.)

But soon he was to find a mentor. He credited the artist John Lunnell with his transformation, describing him as “a good angel from Heaven to pluck me from the pit of modern art”. A sketchbook from 1824 shows a study of “The Bad Thief”, a powerful, contorted figure menaced by a shark-mouthed Satan.
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Lily Silberberg’s story might be that of the 20th century – the good side of the period, not its darker hue. She was born in London in 1929, to Jewish parents whose had fled Russia after the Revolution. Her father was a “journeyman tailor”, her mother an outworker spending her evenings sewing buttonholes late into the night by the light of a gas lamp.

Yet by the time Lily retired, well into her seventies, she had a full, satisfying, successful career behind her. She’d been a respected higher education lecturer, published a book, The Art of Dress Modelling, and spent the last years of her working life teaching her skills to the Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets.

Not bad for a girl who’d at the age of 13 had been sent by her parents – no doubt scraping hard for the fees – to the then Barrett St Technical College (now the London College of Fashion) for a two-year course “intended to take the place of an apprenticeship”. (Gentility came with an optional course in French, two hours a week.)

She’d been a star pupil, yet Lily speaks of the shock of going on to the factory floor. “The standards I’d been taught were of the highest haute courture, the standard of the Queen’s coronation robe. But there had been a war and a revolution in the garment industry. … They would shout at me in the factory: ‘Time is money.’ Can you imagine a bit of confusion?”

Some of her earliest efforts, tremendous labour for such small results, are on display in the British Library’s Fashion Lives exhibition. There’s a neat bunch of red roses embroidered on a handkerchief, made with, we are told, “material of a nightdress that belonged to her mother”.

But there’s a lot more to the exhibition than objects, books and pictures, fabulous as some of those are.
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If you want to see great art, don’t go to the Chinese exhibition at the Royal Academy. If, however, you want to be entertained and delighted, surprised and enlightened, then this is an unmissable event.

From the first room, with its giant portraits of the emperors of the Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong reigns* and the astonishingly crafted garments that match those they are wearing, you are dazzled with brilliant colours and swamped in the astonishing detail and craftsmanship that produced these lovingly preserved samples of what must be largely lost arts.

Almost everything in this extensive exhibition was made to the greater glory of these three men, or for their entertainment**. They appear again and again in different guises, sometimes as fervent Buddhists, sometimes as hunt-obsessed leaders of fierce nomads, sometimes as sober Confucian scholars. (Although the extremely formidable-looking Xiaosheng, Empress Dowager, painted in 1751 for her 60th birthday, does get an airing in this first room.)
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