The Moon and Sixpence (1919) is a novel by W. Somerset Maugham. Inspired by the life of French painter Paul Gauguin, Maugham set out to capture, the disconnect between an artist's desire, to create and their obligations to their loved ones and society. Praised for its multifaceted portrayal of tortured genius and wasted talent, The Moon and Sixpence explores the distance between expectation and desire in a man whose decisions, however, hastily made,...

"A masterful novel that moves from Roman apartments to SoHo galleries to the South of France and tells the story of the son of a great painter striving to create his own legacy, by the bestselling author of THE IMPERFECTIONISTS. Rome, 1955. The artists gather for a picture at a party in an ancient villa. Bear Bavinsky, creator of vast canvases, larger than life, is at the centre of the picture. His wife, Natalie, edges out of the shot. From the side...

Psychiatrist Andrew Marlowe, devoted to his profession and the painting hobby he loves, has a solitary but ordered life. When renowned painter Robert Oliver attacks a canvas in the National Gallery of Art and becomes his patient, Marlow finds that order destroyed. Desperate to understand the secret that torments the genius, he embarks on a journey that leads him into the lives of the women closest to Oliver and a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism....

Madeline Vaughn-Alwin's picture-perfect life fades to gray when her childhood sweetheart perishes in the Great War. The aspiring painter leaves her wealthy New York family behind to travel across the country and start over in California. But when Maddie reaches Santa Fe, New Mexico, she halts her westward journey, certain she's found her new home amid the striking scenery and inspiring artistic community.

"Kevin Pace's latest painting, like so much of his past, remains a secret. Ten years ago, he had an affair with a young watercolorist in Paris. And in the late 1970s, he traveled to El Salvador to search for his best friend's brother, a minor drug dealer gone missing in a country on the verge of war. When the past begins to resurface, Kevin struggles to justify the sacrifices he's made for his art and the secrets he's kept from his wife and family"...

Thomas Railles, an American expatriate and former "odd-jobber" for the CIA, is a successful painter living with his beloved wife, Florette, in a small village in the Pyrenees. On an ordinary autumn day, Florette goes for a walk in the hills and is killed by unknown assailants. Was her death simply a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or was it somehow connected to Thomas's work with the CIA? When French officials detain four Moroccan...

From its first arresting sentence, Sarah Dunant's magnificent novel embroils the reader in the coming-of-age story of Alessandra Cecchi, a fourteen-year-old girl with a strong will and a passion for painting. The Birth of Venus is a tour de force, the first historical novel from one of Britain's most innovative writers of literary suspense. Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter...

Teenaged Wyn Davies took a shortcut through the woods in her New Hampshire hometown and became a cautionary tale. Twenty years later, divorced, she lives in New York making her living painting commissioned canvases of birch trees to match her clients' furnishings. Then she hears that Robby Rousseau, who has spent the past two decades in prison for a terrible crime against her, may be released based on new DNA evidence. Wyn agrees to be temporary caretaker...

Peter Bruegel's paintings---a peasant wedding in a barn, hunters in the snow, a rollicking street festival, and many others---have long defined our idea of everyday life in sixteenth century Europe. They are classic icons of a time and place in much the same way as Norman Rockwell's depictions of twentieth-century America. We know relatively little about Bruegel, but after years of research, novelist Rudy Rucker has built upon what is known and has...