In this chapter, the author wants to make use of the thoughtful account of the work of fiction as a way to approach Alex Miller's The Sitters, an enigmatic, arresting novel about the slippages between painter and subject, between visual art and writing, and between actual and imagined or remembered worlds. Before moving on to consider the question of portraiture in greater detail, she wants to examine the question of visuality in the novel, in particular as it concerns the subject of the portrait. In the careful discursus it provides on the nature and practice of portraiture, The Sitters takes us decisively back into the question of metaphor. With the suggestion that similitude is presented as a space, we are able to take up the insistent similes in the novel's account of landscape, marked through the repetition of the lexical figure of 'as if'.