‘Pluto saw her, and loved her, and bore her off – so swift is love.’ The young Greek goddess Persephone was gathering violets and lilies in a meadow when she was abducted by the god of the underworld and giver of riches. Like Pluto, or so he later tormented himself, the Victorian artist George Frederic Watts (1817– 1904) lured the ingénue Ellen Terry from ‘the temptations and abominations’ of the London stage and in 1864 made her his wife. Unhappy at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, the actress marvelled at the beauty of Watts's studios in the exotic Anglo-Indian home of Thoby and Sara Prinsep (née Pattle). Little Holland House in Kensington seemed to Terry ‘a paradise … where all the women were graceful, and all the men were gifted’. Her hormones aflame, the teenager left the stage for immortality in paint. As her biographer Nina Auerbach writes, ‘She found herself as an artist when she flowered as an artist's model; in pictures she was most mercurially and suggestively alive’. Terry inspired and reacted to Watts's brush more than any other sitter. Together they sparked a visionary intensity never before realized in their art. Such was their creative power that, with her high spirits and his household constraints, the Watts marriage would explode within months. Separately, their art and life transformed, each went on to achieve phenomenal international fame.