By Catriona Miller
If you like reading fiction and you like art, what could possibly be better than novels about paintings and painters? From current best-sellers to nineteenth-century classics, here are some of the best books about art.
Arguably the most famous novel about a painting is Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, one of those books that most people know by reputation - or through watching the film - rather than by having read it. If you have never picked it up, do so! Sometimes lush and poetic, sometimes wonderfully melodramatic and peppered with witty Wildean one-liners, it is an exhilarating read. With Sarah Snook currently taking the West End by storm in her one-woman version, it's also very topical.
Much less fashionable is Emile Zola, whose hard-hitting realist novels have lost the punchy controversy they had when first published. If you're interested in late-nineteenth-century French painting, however, L'Oeuvre (The Masterpiece) takes you straight into the world of the Impressionists, many of whom Zola knew personally. The protagonist, an artist desperately seeking his masterpiece, is based heavily on Paul Cezanne, and his portrayal in the novel caused a permanent rift between the two men.
The current vogue for art literature can probably be traced back to Tracy Chevalier's 1999 The Girl with the Pearl Earring, another one of those novels that has suffered from over-exposure and a film adaptation far less satisfying that the book. Chevalier takes you into the daily life of seventeenth-century Holland, behind the surface of the Vermeers and de Hoochs, and what she does so effectively is capture the peculiar air-less stillness of the paintings. She repeated the trick, slightly less successfully, with The Lady and the Unicorn (2003) based on a set of fifteenth-century tapestries, whilst 2007's Burning Bright centred on the life of artist William Blake.
The twentieth-century master of biographical novels was Irving Stone who produced Lust for Life about Van Gogh (1934), The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961) about Michelangelo and 1985's less well-known Depths of Glory on Camille Pissarro. These are weighty, impeccably researched tomes - Stone also published over 400 of Michelangelo's translated letters - which lean heavily into the 'tortured genius' myth. They are a world away from Elizabeth Fremantle's Disobedient (2023) which tells the story of Artemisia Gentileschi, famously subjected to judicial torture after she was raped by a fellow student in her father's studio - but tells it with renewed punch.
Art plays a less central role in Donna Tartt's 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Goldfinch in which Carel Fabritius' tiny painting of a bird comes into the possession of the young protagonist after a terrorist attack on The Met which kills his mother. The painting becomes a source of guilt and remembrance, but the story is really centered on the life and development of the boy, Theo Decker. Tartt's book is long and tends to polarise opinion, but is one to lose yourself in. Ali Smith similarly balances real art and fiction in How to be Both (2014) which parallel's the story of fifteenth-century Italian painter, Francesco del Cossa with that of teenage George, struggling with the recent death of her mother. Smith's work is all about duality: the book exists in two versions which lead with either George's narrative or that of Francesco, and both are ambivalent about gender. Again, Smith's writing is an acquired taste, intricate and clever rather than an easy read, but worth persevering with.
Other novelists fictionalise the art itself. B. A Shapiro’s The Art Forger (2012) takes the real-life theft of art works from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and runs with it, creating a thriller about forgeries, mis-attributions, and an imagined Degas. Sarah Dunant's The Birth of Venus (2003), is nothing to do with the famous Botticelli painting, but creates an imagined Renaissance artist and his relationship with a patron's daughter, against a beautifully researched and realised recreation of late fifteenth-century Florence. Completely different in style, Headlong (1999) by Michael Frayn imagines a long-lost Pieter Bruegel as the starting point for a Tamara Drewe-style rural farce, which still manages to include a lot of detailed art history
Finally, back to Carel Fabritius, and a special mention for Laura Cumming's Thunderclap which has featured on plenty of 'best of' lists in the last year, and justifiably so. A clever, evocative, and emotionally engaging read, it encompasses the biographies of two artists, one of them the author's father, separated by centuries. Fabritius was a casualty of an explosion at the Delft gunpowder warehouse at the age of only 32 - the 'thunderclap' of the title - but this part-memoir, part-history is really about the emotional impact of art. Beautifully written, it will make you want to head to the nearest gallery and feed your soul.
About the Writer:
Catriona Miller is an independent art historian and writer on art based in the UK. She has taught and lectured on all aspects of art history and is currently researching women artists in British collections and issues of nationalism and identity in nineteenth-century landscape painting.
Twitter: @cmillerartlife
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