THE PAINTED LADIES; A New Exhibition Celebrates History's Most Notorious Women. India Knight, Who Sat for the Artist, Pays Tribute

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Byline: India Knight

POWERFUL women -- whether their influence comes from sex, money, marriage, politics or all four -- have a hard time reputation-wise. They are viragos, seductresses, demonic plotters, enchantresses and witches. They are mad or "unnatural", or both. Rumours abound; gossip swirls; entire careers get reduced to one-liners. Catherine II of Russia, known as Catherine the Great, is remembered for supposedly having relations with a horse, not for her impressive grasp of foreign policy (and the rest).

Sometimes the gossip is not merely career-threatening, but life-ending: Anne Boleyn, a towering figure who helped bring about England's seismic parting from …