This chapter explores the Wattses’ and the De Morgans’ selfportraits and portraits of each other as well as of their famous contemporaries in order to examine the construction of artistic identities, gender-role inversion within creative partnerships, and the self-fashioning of suffragists. It explores public and private self/portraits (that is, self-portraits and/or portraits) in the form of neglected paintings, sketches and photographs in which images and perceptions of these figures as individuals and as couples are built. It also compares the Wattses’ and the De Morgans’ self/portraits with those of their contemporaries, placing them in a wider context to reveal their standpoints and focuses. It explores the gender politics of portraiture and shows how their self/portraits fit into the tradition of Victorian portraiture. A consideration of these figures’ relationships to self-image and self-promotion offers a more nuanced understanding not only of their characters and identities but also of the various extents to which they supported the women's suffrage movement (actively or tacitly, publicly or privately, visibly or invisibly). Central to this chapter is the argument that Mary and Evelyn subverted the hierarchical male artist/female muse dynamic more typical of their time through their portraits of their husbands, and de/re-constructed Victorian notions of gender through their self/portraits. Both women ‘seize the narrative of the traditional relationship between artist and model by asserting the right of her gaze’ (Mancoff 2012: 14). Both life writing (see Chapter 4) and the painting of self-portraits by these women, and Victorian women more broadly, can be seen as assertions of identity and political acts which challenged dominant ideologies and the patriarchal presupposition that the only life worth recording or representing was that of a ‘great man’.

The Wattses’ Self/Portraits

Portraiture played a larger part in the Wattses’ than the De Morgans’ oeuvres. This reflects the Wattses’ greater interest in the practice of portrait painting (Mary in her early years, when she planned to pursue a career in portraiture) and their deep concern with the immortalisation of influential visionaries, thinkers and creators in art for posterity and social edification. This is embodied by George's portrait collection of his famous contemporaries, the ‘Hall of Fame’ (bequeathed to the National Portrait Gallery for posterity in 1895), featuring artists, writers and women's rights supporters.