Makes me think of a poem by Christina Rossetti "In an Artist's Studio", about her brother Dante's obsession with his muse turned wife, Lizzie Siddal.

"One face looks out from all his canvases,

One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:

We found her hidden just behind those screens,

That mirror gave back all her loveliness.

A queen in opal or in ruby dress,

A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,

A saint, an angel — every canvas means

The same one meaning, neither more or less.

He feeds upon her face by day and night,

And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,

Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:

Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;

Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;

Not as she is, but as she fills his dream."

In real life, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of the most famous of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, obsessively painted Lizzie Siddal, seeing her as his "Beatrix" and truest love. Yet when he was actually with her, he was a terrible husband, and Lizzie faded in illness, depression and addiction due in part to the neglect and infidelity of her husband. Once she died of a laudanum overdose (possibly suicide), Rossetti kept painting her, as the Ideal he saw her as. Not seeing that this idealisation he had of her, was in part what killed her.

There was also a story I read in connection to this, where a painter meticulously painted a portrait of his lover, not noticing that as the painting grew in life and beauty, the life faded from his lover an equivalent amount. The last brushstroke on the masterwork was the last breath of the real lover.

Makes me think of this story.