Discover 7 Favorite Books Set in the Art World
The fantastic new novel, The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby, is one of our most favorite recent reads. Set in the art world and spanning nearly 100 years, it brings us the story of a mystery-shrouded masterpiece and the web of intrigue that kept it relevant for so many years.
We asked the writing team behind it, Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos known pseudonymously as Ellery Lloyd, to name a few more art world novels and tell us why they would recommend them. Once you’ve taken a peek, check out the Page & Pairing guide to The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby and discuss these questions with your club.
The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
by Ellery Lloyd
The list.
The Art Forger
by B A Shapiro
This 2012 bestseller is inspired by the real-life Isabella Stewart Gardner heist in 1990. (It’s also the subject of the recent Netflix documentary “This Is a Robbery: The World's Biggest Art Heist”.) Shapiro’s fictional protagonist, Claire Roth, an artist and forger, is commissioned to copy a work looted in the robbery, the novel leading us through the underbelly of the Boston art world, uncovering plots and deceptions and questioning the fallibility of attribution and authenticity.
Anita de Monte Laughs Last
by Xochitl Gonzalez
A Reese pick (just like our last novel, The Club), this magical and atmospheric book is inspired by the life of Ana Mendieta, a Havana-born, New York-based sculptor, painter, and performance artist. She died in 1985, at the age of 36, after falling from an apartment window in suspicious circumstances. In Gonzales’s novel, rising star of the art world Anita de Monte is found dead, briefly becoming the talk of the art world until she is forgotten. Decades later, Raquel, a third-year art history student, stumbles upon her story, which has eerie parallels with her own. The novel asks questions that we also explore in Juliette – who gets remembered and who forgotten, and why, and who is allowed access to the elite.
The Da Vinci Code
by Dan Brown
We couldn’t not include Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code – probably the best-selling book with a painting at its heart of all time (that painting being, of course, Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa”). I think pretty much anyone who has an interest in art history will have devoured this on a sun lounger at some point, while following Robert Langdon, a Harvard symbologist, and police inspector Sophie Neveu as they chase cryptic clues to solve the murder of Louvre curator Jacques Saunière. We spent time in Paris with our six-year-old daughter researching The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby and, for some reason, she was obsessed with seeing the “Mona Lisa” – which, partly thanks to Brown, draws a larger daily crowd than a Taylor Swift concert.
The Last Painting of Sara De Vos
by Dominic Smith
From its immediately arresting opening sentence (“The painting is stolen the same week the Russians put a dog into space” – note the present tense), The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith is a historical novel that brings to life not one period of the past but two in this gripping tale of the travails and triumphs of a (fictional, composite) female painter in seventeenth-century Holland and the theft of her only surviving painting from a private collector in 1950s New York. When its owner commissions a young art student to forge a replacement for it, an elegantly complex plot unfurls over decades in a beautifully-written fictional meditation on the relationship between art and authenticity.
Headlong
by Michael Frayn
In The Last Painting of Sara de Vos both art and artist are elegant composites based on real-life historical predecessors. In Michael Frayn’s Headlong, however, it is the belief that he has discovered a lost work from a real-life series of paintings entitled “The Months” by seventeenth-century Dutch master Pieter Bruegel that comes to obsess the twentieth-century narrator. This idea launches a darkly farcical series of events, which sees him sacrifice all caution and morality (not to mention destroy his marriage) in his desperate attempts to liberate the painting from its present owner, an unlikeable neighbor deep in the English countryside.
Theft: A Love Story
by Peter Carey
The theft that gives Peter Carey’s novel its title is the heist of (and imprisonment for) his own paintings from his ex-wife by the novel’s central protagonist, contemporary Australian painter Michael “Butcher” Boone. We follow his attempts to get his career back on track after his release, with no help at all from his dependent brother or a visit from a suspicious femme fatale who proposes an elaborate authentication scam. Part of the delight of Theft is the care with which the novel recreates a particular era of art history and inserts its own carefully faked works of art and artists into it.
The Goldfinch
by Donna Tartt
One of the unusual aspects of Donna Tartt’s art novel is that the painting in question is a real one, by a real artist – “The Goldfinch” by Carel Pietersz Fabritius (1654). It’s a painting that really was lost for centuries and believed to have been destroyed in the same explosion (of the Delft gunpowder magazine) which killed Fabritius himself at the age of thirty-two. The knowledge that this is a real painting adds power to some of the questions the novel asks about who really owns a work of art and what that might mean, as well as its exploration of how an object of beauty can still cast its spell over us centuries after it was made – a fascination that, as in so many of these novels, teeters on obsession.
Check out our Page & Pairing book club guide for The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby and discuss these questions with your club.