The Painter's Lover

In this beautifully crafted novel, Eduardo Manet, a Cubanborn French novelist and playwright, tells the story of a woman's passion for a famous artist.The artist is his grandfather, the painter Édouard Manet, and the woman his grandmother, Eva Gonzalès, Manet's only pupil and an extraordinary painter in her own right, whose profound understanding of the human soul shines through all her work. The relationship between Manet and Eva is seen through the eyes and the words of Jeanne, Eva's younger sister. In her journals, she chronicles the vicissitudes of love in a time of war and exile, of social and cultural upheaval.From the Franco-Prussian War through the Paris Commune, the fall of the Second Empire and the birth of Impressionism, this story celebrates love as a blind, blinding, yet quintessentially life-giving force, embodied by the extraordinary Eva. She is surrounded by memorable and larger-than-life characters: her beloved sister Jeanne, her charismatic Aunt Dolorès, (the voice of French-born Eva's Spanish family), Suzanne Leenhoff, the somewhat enigmatic wife of her lover Manet, and Berthe Morisot, her rival in art and in love, all presented against the backdrop of the dizzying art world of nineteenth-century Paris.