Aesthetic philosophers and art historians have frequently claimed that the interpretation and production of depictive imagery rely on metaphor. Such claims are often substantiated with reference to creative acts that draw connections between apparently unrelated events and processes, and by investigation of how depictions can recall subjects other than those they directly represent. This chapter investigates these claims in pursuit of one of this book’s guiding questions: How is metaphor involved in recognising depicted subjects in marked surfaces? I highlight the phenomenon of ‘fortuitous realism’, which refers to the act of imaginatively seeing something in a naturally occurring visual array. I argue that such imaginative acts highlight the use of metaphoric conceptualisation because they depend on the ability to make unexpected connections between distinct aspects of experience, and that this ability is central to the development of drawing practice in early life. However, metaphor is less strongly activated once a drafter has established systems of correspondences between graphic marks and perceived or imagined scenes. I conclude that all drawing and denotation systems constitute ways of visually providing specific types of knowledge about the subjects they depict, and that these epistemological visual metaphors are the central denotative function of picture-metaphors.