This studio-based research consists of a textual analysis as well as a pictorial output. It focuses on the specific interactions that occur between the artist, the model and the sitter in the production of studio portraits. I shift the emphasis from the portrait as an object or a record of a personality to the process of posing and depiction, and argue that the concept of the sitter as a portrait’s referent is a ‘counterfeit’ endemic to portraiture. The sitter is a specific pictorial construct that manifests at the intersection of performances by an artist and a model in the studio. This research will contribute significantly to the discourse on artist/model/sitter transactions—a discourse that is underexamined in the genre of portraiture.