It is still less than a hundred years since women received the vote on the same terms as men in 1928. This board game was produced in c1909 by the WSPU to depict the various struggles women were forced to confront. Players move through obstacles such as demonstrations, arrests, hunger strikes, and force feeding to reach the House of Parliament and the right to vote at the centre of the board. It was called Pank-a-Squith after Emmeline Pankhurst and Herbert Asquith, Prime Minister and opponent of women's suffrage.

This week is very much about elections, here in the UK and in France, and later in the year in the US. All three could prove to be major turning points, and we shall be watching, hoping and, of course, using our vote.

A while ago, Andrew Graham-Dixon wrote apropos of 'The Swagger Portrait' exhibition in 1992 at the Tate that "the tragedy of modern British portraiture may not be, exactly, that the swagger portrait died out - but, rather, that the more worthy, less adventurous, Protestant version finally won the day". Girton College in Cambridge would be the last to agree with his view of contemporary portraiture; it houses the marvellous People's Portraits collection (open daily to the public). It ties in with the focus in so many of our book on on ordinary, unexceptional lives. This is dinner lady Joy (2010, Girton College) by Robin Lee-Hall. 

While swagger portraits are fascinating and, revealing, it is significant that our authors are not the swaggering sort in their portraits (or books). This portrait of E M Forster (1911, private collection) by Roger Fry (1866-1934) is, appropriately for the subject, the antithesis of swagger. Pictured in a domestic Bloomsbury setting, he almost disappears into the folds of his plain, crumpled tweed suit - but we should not be deceived by appearances. For many reasons, Forster is a favourite novelist, and we publish Two Cheers for Democracy. 

Swagger portraits are not confined to the rich, famous, and expensively dressed. This is Le Chef de l'Hôtel Chatham, Paris (c1921, Royal Academy) by Wlliam Orpen (1878-1931). According to the RA, it is "a tour de force of monumental portraiture...Orpen was inspired by artists such as Velázquez and Manet, but in his choice of subject he elevates the working man by portraying him with a swagger and authority equal to any nobleman." 

The John Singer Sargent exhibition at Tate Britain which displays portraits and many of the garments worn in them proves that portraits of rich, society people wearing beautiful clothes still attract crowds and critics, and that women can swagger just as well as men. This is ' Lady Helen Vincent, Viscountess d'Abernon' (1904, Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama). The exhibition complements The Shuttle about which is about English aristocrats marrying American heiresses, some of whom Sargent painted.

We have portraits on the Post this week, beginning with 'Strike a Pose', a new exhibition at Kenwood of work by Stephen Farthing who has been fascinated throughout his career by Grand Manner or ‘swagger' portraits. During Covid lockdowns, he made new paintings after the set of portraits by the Jacobean artist William Larkin (c.1580 - 1619) at Kenwood, "which leave no doubt in the viewer’s mind about the wealth and prestige of their subjects". This is A Dance To The Music of Time (Cecil after Larkin), (2020-21).