Exhibition - Kathryn Hughes on how a few made it from below stairs to the walls of an art gallery

The walls of grand country houses are hung with paintings that speak of leisure and pleasure: ladies wearing court dress; gentlemen in their best wigs; spooky-looking children who might be of either sex lolling around looking as if the long, summer afternoon of their pre-eminence will never end. The subhuman is there, too. There are endless paintings of dogs, muddy and exhausted from the shoot, and plenty of horses, racers mostly, sleekly filling the frame. But what you are much less likely to find on these walls is any reference to the people whose daily labour made these self- contained communities glide from decade to decade. Domestic servants - that army of butlers, footmen, cooks and, above all, maids - have been virtually excluded from the visual record of the country house culture they powered from the Middle Ages to the eve of the Second World War.

There are some happy exceptions to this bleak rule, and the few surviving portraits of men and women who spent their lives in service form the basis of this elegiac exhibition. You cannot help thinking about all the thousands of their nameless, faceless colleagues who have simply slipped from view. And there are difficult questions to be answered about how and why these particular individuals were picked from obscurity and invited (indeed, were they ever given the chance to refuse?) to sit for their portrait. The exhibition's curators, Giles Waterfield and Anne French, explain that usually a servant was painted when she - or, much more usually, he - had contributed a record number of years in loyal service to one family (given that servants started aged 12, six decades in harness was not unheard of). The point here was not to record the personality of the particular sitter, who was very often represented as a type devoid of distinguishing features, but to celebrate the idea of long and faithful service. From the Middle Ages onwards, there had never been a time in Britain when servants were not a "problem" - uppity, restless, always giving notice in the hope of finding something better. Commemorating an individual who had managed to stay put for decades was a way of subtly advertising your own niceness as an employer (if you can inspire such bonds of affection, you must be OK) and reinforcing the hope that one day the glorious time would come again when the ideal of personal service was enough to keep people of very different social and economic ranks together.

Male servants were more likely to get their portrait painted because, as grooms, huntsmen and gamekeepers, they came into contact with the master of the house in real and meaningful ways. An anonymous housemaid was no more than a swish of skirt on the stairs, but you noticed the man who bred your hounds or broke your horses. Even then it was not unusual to celebrate his function rather than his soul. In The Dudmaston Gamekeeper with Spaniel and Dead Partridge (c 1720), one of the most striking works in the exhibition, a slab of a man is known to posterity not by his name but by his props: a gun dog, whip and dead game. Later, these liminal men - one foot inside the calm and stately building, the other in the woods, farms and streets that lie beyond - were permitted something closer to an identity. In a mezzotint portrait by Richard Earlom of 1811, the coachman to Mr Boulton is surrounded with the expected signifiers - a whip, top hat and blanket - but he is also named as Robert Pointer while, in a strange counter-tug, Mr Boulton goes without his Christian name.

When a woman servant is painted, perhaps because it is so unusual, she is more fully herself. Beloved nurses and nannies are the most frequent subjects, remembered for their personal qualities rather than a set of generic skills. One of the most touching portraits in the exhibi- tion is of Catherine Hughes, nanny to the Williams Family of Bodelwyddan. She is painted without props and allowed to fill the miniature frame as if she were any elderly woman of no particular class loved simply for herself. On the back of the portrait, Hughes's former charge wrote: "The dear old nurse at Bodleywithan. I had this taken of her when I married."

"Below Stairs" makes it clear that not every country house wanted to think of itself as a repository of timeless moral values and simple bonds of affection. A remarkable series of portraits in the exhibition commissioned by the rather racy Duke of Dorset in 1783 shows his servants at Knole doing everything that contemporary moralists thought servants should not do: wearing fashionable clothes, aping gentry manners, even daring to fall romantically in love (as opposed to choosing a partner on account of their nifty way with a needle or an ability to dig turnips). The duke was at this time sharing his bedchamber with Madame Baccelli, a glamorous French woman whose sophisticated ways rubbed off on the servants at Knole. Two of them, an engaged couple called David Taylor and Elinor Low, are painted looking hungrily at each other, allowed the kind of full subjectivity and narrative possibilities (they will marry, their lives will continue beyond the frame of the picture) that are normally granted only to dukes and their fancy lady friends.

As the exhibition moves into the 19th century, the focus shifts towards the middle-class town house, struggling to get by with a couple of housemaids. Since these were exactly the kinds of homes in which professional artists lived, it is not surprising to see the workings of these modest terraces spilling out on canvas. Servants now become props and subjects in narrative or genre painting (you didn't have to pay them to model and presumably they were happy to put their feet up for a couple of hours), a kind of commodity offered up for the newly commercial art market. W P Frith, who got rich by understanding the tastes of the high Victorian bourgeoisie, painted a servant girl as pink and unruffled, while the subjects of John Finnie's Maids of All Work are cheery cockneys, extras who have for an unwitting moment moved centre stage. Over time, this kind of painting was put in the service of satire and social comment. In 1890, Frederick Elwell painted a sly butler stealing a drink while clearing up after a pretentious middle-class dinner party (the kind of event thrown by a "new" family who do not quite know how to supervise their proliferating staff). And in a painting from 1860, Emily Mary Osborn used the familiar trope of the put-upon governess to point up the vulgarity of her overdressed mistress and sly, frilly children.

"Below Stairs" is packed full of good things. The section on African and Asian servants - highly prized for their exoticism and the way they marked you out as someone with a bit of class (the Queen, after all, had her Munshi) - is especially telling. Most important, though, is the way the exhibition makes you think about a subject that you thought you already knew. Not everyone who appears in the exhibition has a name, but all have a face that, if attended to properly, is ready to speak.

"Below Stairs: 400 years of servants' portraits" is at the National Portrait Gallery, London WC2, until 11 January

Kathryn Hughes is writing a biography of Mrs Beeton

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