APPRECIATION of female beauty is universal but its portrayal, choice of subject and sitter, alters over time.

This impressive assembly of masterpieces focuses on the loveliness of fresh-faced, fair-skinned natural-looking English women, mostly in the bloom of youth.

The social scope is broad, ranging from Van Dyke's formal portraits of Queen Henrietta Maria, English by proxy as consort to Charles I, whose brown eyes, soft curls and cream complexion set a trend judging by adjacent pictures, to lowly Captain's Daughter by the 19th century artist James Tissot, more captivated perhaps by her pretty frock than her face.

Dress is one of several levels of enjoyment. In George Romney's full-length portrait of an aristocratic lady, sumptuous clothes set off delicate features; there is Gainsborough's Mrs Siddons, formidable actress in fashionable attire; and from the Bowes' collection, Joshua Reynolds' Portrait of a Lady, charming in chiffon.

The works cover a 400-year period between the 17th and 20th centuries and explore the English Rose aesthetic. A key example is the museum’s recent acquisition, Olivia, Mrs Endymion Porter, by Van Dyke, showing her in nightgown and pearls.

Attitudes were relaxed about who was appropriate for admiration in addition to noble women and the wives and and daughters of the gentry.

Romney was obsessed with sultry actress Emma Hart, later the scandalous Lady Hamilton. The Pre-Raphaelites, too, had their obsessions. Rossetti's idealised beauty is represented in a typical group of dreamy-faced females looking half-drugged, as if waiting to be woken or taken.

More lovely is the simple grace of Perugini's Girl Reading, though dark apple-laden boughs pressed up close behind her seated figure suggest she may be ripe for taking.

William Powell Frith painted his daughters at archery practice, illustrating women's greater freedoms, while John Singer Sargent's superb charcoal drawing of the Edwardian belle dame of Duncombe Park conveys a commanding beauty one imagines was never denied anything.

The exhibition runs until September 25.

Pru Farrier