Esther’s self-portraits are the first known self-portraits by a woman writer or artist in Britain. Esther Inglis made four portrait types within her lifetime, beginning with the first type which she did in black and white. These were created between 1599 and about 1602. They’re based very closely on an engraved portrait of the French poet, Georgette de Montenay, in her book of a hundred Christian emblems. Esther was probably using an edition from about 1584 of Montenay’s book. The picture in NLS 20498 is a good example. It’s a ¾ length portrait of her sitting at her desk with her pen in her right hand, near a bottle of ink. A notebook open in front of her shows her motto, which in French reads “De l’Eternel le bien, de moi le mal ou rien”, or “Everything good comes from God, from myself there’s really nothing”. By her left elbow you’ll see a lute and some music sitting on the desk; these were motifs used by Renaissance women artists and writers to show that they were respectable ladies engaged in the work thought proper at the time for women. The frame is made up of architectural motifs, which were popular in engraved portraits of the period, and include her name, “Esther Anglois Françoise”, which is a play on the words “Esther the English French-woman".

For the second portrait type, there are four of those, and four variants. They tend to date from 1606 to 1612. In these portraits, Esther heads in an entirely new direction, because she paints in colour. The first ones of these are very elaborate, and they show her again sitting at a desk, but facing to our right. She is shown dressed in black against a rich blue background, and she is holding a pen in her right hand, with an inkpot nearby on the red table-top. This time, the notebook that is open in front of her is blank, and she has discarded the lute and music by this time, evidently thinking she does not really need those to certify her own seriousness as a professional woman artist. She has updated her costume too, because she is living in London by now; she has a ruff instead of a plain colour, and she wears a jaunty little black cap instead of the large French cap with a veil in the earlier portraits. Again, the frame is made up of architectural motifs taken from an early book on engraving, and includes fanciful birds – parrots, that is – a dog, and a squirrel. I think that the squirrel is a cute reference to the fact that squirrel hairs were used for the brush with which she did her fine painting. Later versions of this portrait cut out the desk and the decorative frame, and they just show her ¾ length in her black dress and small hat against a blue background.

There’s a wonderful portrait of Esther Inglis in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. As with many portraits of this period we don’t know the name of the artist, but it is very similar to other portraits of the time that were done of professional middle-class women, usually showing them wearing a tall black cap. Her high black hat in this portrait is called a cabuchon, and she has a starched ruff around her neck which is in a figure-eight design, it’s very elaborate and difficult to make. Her under-bodice in the front of her dress is filled with flowers done in blackwork embroidery that looks like some of her own calligraphy. Her black dress is her very best, the sleeves striped with velvet. The three rings on her left hand, and the carnation and honeysuckle entwined in the upper left, suggest this was a marriage portrait, because those flowers were associated with marriage in northern European paintings. The painting was made in 1595, when she was about 25 years old, and her first children – the twins, Samuel and Agnes – were born in March 1597, so that is about right for the date of a marriage portrait, and she’s obviously wearing her best clothes in it.