This Chapter concerns the ways that artistic copyright functioned as a law protecting the ‘face’ or likeness of the sitter from the late 1850s to 1911. As well as considering how copyright ownership by the commissioner was motivated by the wish to protect the private nature of portrait paintings, I show that photographic copyright operated akin to a modern day publicity right in the two decades following the passage of the Fine Arts Copyright Act 1862. Copyright law, in providing a legal underpinning for trade understandings, contributed to the creation and protection of the commercial interests that accompanied the rise of the celebrity image described in art historical scholarship (Peter Hamilton and Roger Hargreaves’ The Beautiful and the Damned: The Creation of Identity in Nineteenth Century Photography); the scheme of section 1 of the 1862 Act facilitated trade distinctions between ‘public’ and ‘private’ photographs, and trade practice shaped litigation before magistrates. While a number of changes complicated copyright’s role in protecting the face in the period 1880-1911, drawing on rare archival material, I show that, in the context of the theatre, copyright continued to operate akin to a publicity right to the early years of the twentieth century.