ABSTRACT
Aside from occasional allusions to the classical tradition, English literature did not begin to concern itself with artists and models until the middle of the 19th century, when a new mode of representing the arts in fiction arose out of the increasing importance and popularity of art, both as a bourgeois occupation and as a professional career. In middle-class domestic fictions, the artistic setting of studios and galleries began to appear as a kind of alternative moral cosmos, in which the dominant social values might be questioned or revised. Although this development owed much to the gradual assimilation of French literary Realism into the conventions of English fiction, it also occurred within an older tradition of fictional portraiture, in which the pictured likeness of a person, living or dead, represented an enhanced dimension of self-knowledge, which might be felt – or missed – by its maker, its subject, or its viewer. Something of the portrait's reflective power was retained in the figure of the artist's model.
