Printz

Imagine writing a novel about a man named Jacob Printz who lost his purpose in life. Imagine describing the one constant in Jacob’s life, the image of Seated Woman he first viewed as a much younger person, an image he comes back to over and over to make sense of the loves and losses in his life. This is the image by de Kooning that you, as the author, saw in the same museum several years before, an image that intrigues and haunts you, informing your determination to better describe the world Jacob Printz inhabits, first with his sister Catherine and later with his lover Greta. As you near the end of writing Jacob Printz’s story, you and your editor begin to search for an image of Jacob to grace the cover of your new novel. During a trip to London, you stumble on a print of Amedeo Modigliani’s 1915 painting of the sculptor Henri Laurens. You show the print to your editor, and she agrees, “That’s him.” The novel edited, the cover design completed, you realize that de Kooning’s Seated Woman has to be there too, and you and your editor find a place for her on the back cover. Only weeks prior to publication, you say to yourself, “I have to see the original Modigliani—I have to make sure he is Jacob Printz.” You travel to Lucerne, Switzerland, to the Rosengart Collection to view the painting in person. “What if it is not right after all?” But there it is—better than imagined: Portrait of Henri Laurens, sitting, 1915! And what is beside it? Who knew? A sculpture of Seated Woman by the same Henri Laurens, the same man who is the subject of Amedeo Modigliani’s painting, the same painting you have chosen for the cover of your novel Printz, a sculpture that is a near mirror image of the painting Seated Woman by de Kooning, which you have been pondering for several years before even starting to write Printz. 

Maryann D’Agincourt is an author who is inspired by art and artists. She first often visited the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston as a young girl and merged her love of literature and art into the literary genre of art fiction. Printz is Book 4 in her Art Fiction series.  What is Art Fiction? Maryann D’Agincourt has merged her passions for art and literature into a unique and powerful form of storytelling. Art Fiction is a literary genre in which art is not solely an object, but is a reflection of what is human in all of us. Glimpses of Gauguin is a foremost novel of Art Fiction. Other examples include:

Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

May Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok

Moon and Sixpence by Somerset Maugham

The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins

The Real Thing by Henry James

The Gold Finch by Donna Tartt

The Art Forger by B.A. Shapiro

The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant

The Passion of Artemisia by Susan Vreeland