A discussion of Collins’s relationships with Victorian painters, especially the Pre-Raphaelites, established through his father and brother, who were themselves painters

It is difficult to identify Decadent art in the same manner one can identify Decadent poetry or a Decadent novel. This chapter argues that late nineteenth-century neoclassical British, French Symbolist and Decadent painting were neglected by art historians of the first half of the twentieth century, disparaged for their lack of formal innovation, with their Decadent subject matter – in particular its investment in violence and eroticism – largely neglected. Painters such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Frederic Leighton were acceptable to a late Victorian art public because their depictions of violent death and sexual dissidence were anchored in the classical past and myth. The nude, when linked to religion, still had the capacity to outrage Victorians, as did artists like Félicien Rops, whose darker, less idealized depiction of sensuality marked them as Decadent. These anxieties came together in responses to depictions of Salome, the ultimate Decadent femme fatale.

The final two chapters offer different kinds of case study, examining specific, much-repeated compositions across the whole history of photography from the nineteenth century to the present. This chapter analyses the legacy in photographs of John Everett Millais’ painting Ophelia (1851), with a focus on the representation of women’s bodies in representations of Ophelia’s death by drowning in Hamlet. I look at works by Gregory Crewdson, Tom Hunter, Ana Mendieta, Toshiko Okanoue, Francesca Woodman, and Man Ray. I argue that photographs have contributed to the pathologising of Ophelia as a ‘complex’ or diagnosis, and as a means of representing female distress as an aesthetic pleasure.

Moving away from formal performance contexts, this chapter considers the act of posing for a photograph as a kind of performance, which can be morally and emotionally engaged. I focus on the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, whose images show models taking on Shakespearean characters in complex and ambivalent ways. The chapter considers Cameron’s engagement with Shakespeare in comparison to that of some of her contemporaries, including William Holman Hunt, Clementina Hawarden, Henry Peach Robinson, and George Frederic Watts. The final part of the chapter emphasises the instability of Shakespearean identities in the afterlives of Cameron’s works, showing how her image Iago Study from an Italian has accumulated biblical and Dickensian associations in addition to its Shakespearean caption.