Meet the Chevalier, a part of early 19th-century fashionable London society. A French diplomat, soldier, spy, celebrity fencer, performer and author, d’Eon lived and dressed throughout their life as both a man and woman. A source of fascination, people placed bets on their biological sex, and they were offered huge sums to be physically examined.

Shown neither as butch man, nor as gentile Georgian woman, there’s a calm ambiguity to this painting. The sitter has an understated reservation about them, perhaps a quiet queerness that we can sense, as much as we can visibly see or learn about in a biography or from an art history textbook. There’s something in the portrait that seems to be asking us a question, rather than making a statement.

NPG curators have hung d’Eon in Room 18 with a group of boxers and fighters. While d’Eon was a diplomat, their portrait isn’t shown alongside the grand dukes and famous poets, instead it’s in a corner, next to the door, with the knuckle-baring ne’er-do-wells and the societal misfits – a place where queer people often find themselves, perhaps by accident, perhaps quite happily.

The text above is from ‘Does this portrait look queer to you?’ my winning essay in the Royal Society of Portrait Painters’ Critical Writing competition, 2024. You can read the full text here.