Sappho was an occasional subject for the "historical" painters of Victorian England, particularly Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema. Sappho was probably chosen as the subject of these paintings because in painting the historical figure, "accuracy" could justify otherwise scandalous images of scantily-clad young women.

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Alma Tadema depicted Sappho for the same reason that he painted the frenzy of the Maenads or girlish frolics in Roman bath-houses: these subjects provided maximum opportunity for titillation. Alma Tadema's Sappho is, moreover, pointedly heterosexual.

Another Victorian, Simeon Solomon, also painted Sappho in the "classical" style. But Simeon's own homosexuality lends this work a darker eroticism. In his famous painting Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene (1864, displayed in the Tate Gallery, London), Erinna swoons with desire in Sappho's embrace.

Feminist artists, of whatever sexuality, have largely ignored her. The "women of the Left Bank," expatriate lesbians from England and the United States who gathered in Paris between the world wars, certainly took inspiration from Sappho, but they did not paint or draw her.

Later in the twentieth century, heterosexual artist Judy Chicago included Sappho in her Dinner Party project (1974-1979), in which famous women from history are each represented by an embroidered place-setting and a sculpted ceramic plate, but this is one of only a handful of images.

Given that feminist and lesbian artists commonly make use of other female figures from classical times, the paucity of representations of Sappho is puzzling.

Ancient Greek and Roman art represents a variety of homoerotic experience in several different ways.

American painter and sculptor Judy Chicago has contributed to gay and lesbian culture through her feminist critique of heterosexuality and patriarchy.

Admired through the ages as one of the greatest lyric poets, the ancient Greek writer Sappho is today esteemed by lesbians around the world as the archetypal lesbian and their symbolic mother.

Known for his association with the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement, British artist Simeon Solomon created homoerotic works and suffered as a victim of late nineteenth-century English homophobia.

Renée Vivien, who had many affairs with women, openly celebrated lesboerotic love in her poetry and dreamed of women-controlled spaces in an era when most women were still domestically confined.