Spectator competition winners: the Mona Lisa has her say

In Competition No. 3214, you were invited to choose a well-known painted portrait and let the subject speak for itself, in poetry or prose.

Among those who seized the opportunity to have their say were pre-Raphaelite poster girl Lizzie Siddal, who fell dangerously ill while spending several months floating in a tin bath for Millais’s 1852 ‘Ophelia’; David Hockney’s Mr and Mrs Clark (and their cat Percy); Franz Hals’s ‘Laughing Cavalier’; and ‘Weeping Woman’ Dora Maar (‘All his portraits of me are lies. They’re Picassos. Not one is Dora Maar,’ she once told the American writer James Lord.)

The challenge drew a modestly sized but accomplished entry and in another hotly contested week, honourable mentions go to Nicholas Lee, P.C. Peirse-Duncombe and Chris O’Carroll. The winners, printed below, are rewarded with £30 each.

The longshanks with the distant look, that’s me, A nervous fugitive from the settee Caught in mid-stride, fingering my moustache, While Fanny, radiant with light, must squash Against the painting’s edge, where, duly sprawled, She prophesies I’ll wear the carpet bald.