The Lost Masterpiece
A Novel
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A USA TODAY BESTSELLER
An enigmatic painting. The mystery of who painted it. A riveting thriller from the bestselling author of The Art Forger.
In a gripping novel full of plot twists, B. A. Shapiro embeds us in a circle of famous painters in late-nineteenth-century Paris, centering on the anguished Impressionist artist Berthe Morisot—the one woman in their midst who never got her due—and the story of Morisot’s great-great-great-great granddaughter, Tamara Rubin, who has inherited Édouard Manet’s Party on the Seine, a painting that completely upends her life.
When Tamara inherits Party, she discovers a long-hidden family history replete with unanswered questions: How had it been stolen by the Nazis? How had the painting managed to survive three disasters that destroyed every other artwork around it? And most of all, why had she never known about her ancestor, Berthe Morisot? As the painting begins to metamorphose into darker and more terrifying versions of itself, Tamara’s ordinary life is thrown into turmoil. What wounds and resentments plagued Morisot, and to what lengths will her spirit go for revenge?
The Lost Masterpiece is a story of love, adultery, betrayal, family secrets, and the grueling birth of Impressionism, taking the reader on a whirlwind adventure from the streets of Paris in the late 1800s and the studio Berthe Morisot shared with Manet, Degas, and Renoir to the present day. Shapiro brings Berthe’s world to life, tracing her work through generations of descendants and introducing us to a painter as brilliant and original as her male counterparts across 150 years of triumphs, struggles, passions, animosities, and malevolence.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The skilllful if uneven latest from Shapiro (Metropolis) tracks a purported Édouard Manet painting with supernatural powers from its seizure by the Nazis to its present-day recovery. In 1868 Paris, 28-year-old artist Berthe Morisot falls in love with fellow painter Manet, but he refuses to leave his wife for her, so she marries his brother Eugène instead. Berthe's art collection remains in the family until the Nazis seize it from her granddaughter Colette in 1940. In the present, biotech executive Tamara Rubin, an orphan with no knowledge of her lineage, learns from an art reclamation agency that as Colette's only living descendent, she has inherited a painting attributed to Manet: Party on the Seine, which was recently rediscovered in a Nazi hideaway and which depicts Berthe among other partygoers. After Tamara hangs the painting in her Boston apartment, she notices the painted Berthe winking at her. She attributes this to the cannabis gummies she'd recently eaten, until she realizes that the figure shifts when she's sober, too. Moreover, every time the painting is displayed, all other artworks hanging around it are destroyed. The strained paranormal elements fall flat, but Shapiro shines in her depictions of Berthe's life and the challenges faced by women artists in 19th-century Paris. Those with an interest in Impressionism ought to take a look.
