Abstract
The late-Victorian neoclassical artists George Frederic Watts, Frederic Leighton and Edward Poynter posed three famous actresses, Ellen Terry, Dorothy Dene and Lillie Langtry, in paintings whose subjects were drawn from Antiquity. The choice of mythological or tragic themes would categorize these works as “subject paintings” and not as portraits and yet the actuality of and likeness to the sitter blur such classifications. Building on research on 18th-century portraiture, this article studies a number of works that help address issues linked to their unstable categorisation as portrait or “subject picture”. Besides, two of the artists were romantically involved with the sitters, which raises autobiographical issues. All in all, the painters resorted to Antiquity in order to ennoble the celebrities at a time when models and actresses were frowned upon. However, this artistic ambition collided with the commodification of these actresses’ faces in the context of marketplace culture.
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