Portrait of an Unknown Woman

Author: Daniel Silva
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062834924
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 403

Book Description
In a spellbinding new masterpiece by #1 New York Times bestselling author Daniel Silva, Gabriel Allon undertakes a high-stakes search for the greatest art forger who ever lived Legendary spy and art restorer Gabriel Allon has at long last severed ties with Israeli intelligence and settled quietly in Venice, the only place where he has ever truly known peace. His beautiful wife, Chiara, has taken over the day-to-day management of the Tiepolo Restoration Company, and their two young children are discreetly enrolled in a neighborhood scuola elementare. For his part, Gabriel spends his days wandering the streets and canals of the watery city, bidding farewell to the demons of his tragic, violent past. But when the eccentric London art dealer Julian Isherwood asks Gabriel to investigate the circumstances surrounding the rediscovery and lucrative sale of a centuries-old painting, he is drawn into a deadly game of cat and mouse where nothing is as it seems. Gabriel soon discovers that the work in question, a portrait of an unidentified woman attributed to Sir Anthony van Dyck, is almost certainly a fiendishly clever fake. To find the mysterious figure who painted it—and uncover a multibillion-dollar fraud at the pinnacle of the art world—Gabriel conceives one of the most elaborate deceptions of his career. If it is to succeed, he must become the very mirror image of the man he seeks: the greatest art forger the world has ever known. Stylish, sophisticated, and ingeniously plotted, Portrait of an Unknown Woman is a wildly entertaining journey through the dark side of the art world—a place where unscrupulous dealers routinely deceive their customers and deep-pocketed investors treat great paintings as though they were just another asset class to be bought and sold at a profit. From its elegant opening to the shocking twists of its climax, the novel is a tour de force of storytelling and one of the finest pieces of heist fiction ever written. And it is still more proof that, when it comes to international intrigue and suspense, Daniel Silva has no equal.

Portrait of an Unknown Lady

Author: Maria Gainza
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1646220331
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 118

Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice New York Times Notable author María Gainza, who dazzled critics with Optic Nerve, returns with the captivating story of an auction house employee on the trail of an enigmatic master forger In the Buenos Aires art world, a master forger has achieved legendary status. Rumored to be a woman, she specializes in canvases by the painter Mariette Lydis, a portraitist of Argentinean high society. But who is this absurdly gifted creator of counterfeits? What motivates her? And what is her link to the community of artists who congregate, night after night, in a strange establishment called the Hotel Melancólico? On the trail of this mysterious forger is our narrator, an art critic and auction house employee through whose hands counterfeit works have passed. As she begins to take on the role of art-world detective, adopting her own methods of deception and manipulation, she warns us “not to proceed in expectation of names, numbers or dates . . . My techniques are those of the impressionist.” Driven by obsession and full of subtle surprise, Portrait of an Unknown Lady is a highly seductive and enveloping meditation on what we mean by "authenticity" in art, and a captivating exploration of the gap between what is lived and what is told.

Portrait of an Unknown Woman

Author: Vanora Bennett
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0007224931
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 536

Book Description
The year is 1527. Hans Holbein is at the beginning of his career when he travels to England under the patronage of Sir Thomas More. As a guest in the splendid More household, he begins to paint their family portrait. The Holbein family portraits frame this story with its background of love, family, and political turmoil.

Tudor & Jacobean Portraits

Author: Roy Strong
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 420

Book Description

Portrait of Julia

Author: Robert MacNeil
Publisher: Formac Publishing Company Limited
ISBN: 1459502922
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
In 1920 Julia Robertson is a young, beautiful war widow, aware of the radical new ideas bursting into the settled thinking of post-Victorian Canada. That new thinking, about the human unconscious through Freud and Jung, about sexual frankness, about women as well as skepticism about religion, shaped the emerging 20th century world and infused modern painting, music, and literature. Julia struggles with her conscience over the man she most trusts when she is passionately infatuated with another, an Englishman. He leads her into the orbit of the young and charming Prince of Wales. Leaving behind the stuffy world of Halifax, she goes to London and Paris and then the South of France where she renews her close friendship with one of the great Canadian painters of the period, J.W. Morrice. She becomes part of Morrice's circle of artists and admirers, among them Henri Matisse, who was Morrice's close friend. Ultimately Julia has to resolve a dilemma that dramatically tests all her progressive ideas. With this novel Robert MacNeil returns to a character who first appears in his bestselling novel set at the time of the Halifax Explosion, Burden of Desire. "Julia's appetite for life and her bold embrace of the modern world was so vivid to me that I had to follow her life into the postwar world," says MacNeil. The result is a fascinating account of a young woman in the midst of a world in transformation.

Optic Nerve

Author: Maria Gainza
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1948226170
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
"In this delightful autofiction―the first book by Gainza, an Argentine art critic, to appear in English―a woman delivers pithy assessments of world–class painters along with glimpses of her life, braiding the two into an illuminating whole." ―The New York Times Book Review, Notable Book of the Year and Editors' Choice The narrator of Optic Nerve is an Argentinian woman whose obsession is art. The story of her life is the story of the paintings, and painters, who matter to her. Her intimate, digressive voice guides us through a gallery of moments that have touched her. In these pages, El Greco visits the Sistine Chapel and is appalled by Michelangelo’s bodies. The mystery of Rothko’s refusal to finish murals for the Seagram Building in New York is blended with the story of a hospital in which a prostitute walks the halls while the narrator’s husband receives chemotherapy. Alfred de Dreux visits Géricault’s workshop; Gustave Courbet’s devilish seascapes incite viewers “to have sex, or to eat an apple”; Picasso organizes a cruel banquet in Rousseau’s honor . . . All of these fascinating episodes in art history interact with the narrator’s life in Buenos Aires―her family and work; her loves and losses; her infatuations and disappointments. The effect is of a character refracted by environment, composed by the canvases she studies. Seductive and capricious, Optic Nerve marks the English–language debut of a major Argentinian writer. It is a book that captures, like no other, the mysterious connections between a work of art and the person who perceives it.

Portrait of a Spy

Author: Daniel Silva
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062072196
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 468

Book Description
“A bona fide thrill ride.” —Miami Herald “Silva builds tension with breathtaking double and triple turns of plot.” —People Portrait of a Spy is Silva’s eleventh thriller to feature art restorer and master spy Gabriel Allon as he races from Great Britain to Washington to New York to the Middle East on the trail of a deadly and elusive terrorist network responsible for massacres in Paris, Copenhagen, and at London’s Covent Garden.

Imagined Lives

Author: National Portrait Gallery (Great Britain)
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781855144552
Category : Imaginary biography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
"Eight internationally acclaimed authors have invented imaginary biographies and character sketches based on fourteen unidentified portraits... in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery."--Back cover.

Portrait of a Woman in Silk

Author: Zara Anishanslin
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300220553
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Book Description
Through the story of a portrait of a woman in a silk dress, historian Zara Anishanslin embarks on a fascinating journey, exploring and refining debates about the cultural history of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world. While most scholarship on commodities focuses either on labor and production or on consumption and use, Anishanslin unifies both, examining the worlds of four identifiable people who produced, wore, and represented this object: a London weaver, one of early modern Britain’s few women silk designers, a Philadelphia merchant’s wife, and a New England painter. Blending macro and micro history with nuanced gender analysis, Anishanslin shows how making, buying, and using goods in the British Atlantic created an object-based community that tied its inhabitants together, while also allowing for different views of the Empire. Investigating a range of subjects including self-fashioning, identity, natural history, politics, and trade, Anishanslin makes major contributions both to the study of material culture and to our ongoing conversation about how to write history.

Letter from an Unknown Woman and Other Stories

Author: Stefan Zweig
Publisher: Pushkin Press
ISBN: 1782270094
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Book Description
These four Stefan Zweig stories, newly translated by the award-winning Anthea Bell, are among his most celebrated and compelling work. The titular tale is a devastating depiction of unrequited love, which inspired a classic Hollywood film, directed by Max Ophüls and starring Joane Fontaine. Elsewhere in the collection, a young man mistakes the girl he loves for her sister, two erstwhile lovers meet after an age spent apart, and a married woman repays a debt of gratitude to her childhood sweetheart. Expertly paced, laced with the acutely accurate psychological detail and empathy that are Zweig's trademarks, this is a powerful addition to Pushkin's growing collection of his work.