5 Terrific Novels About Art and Artists

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
Tartt’s 2013 Pulitzer Prize–winning bestseller has at its heart a charming painting of a goldfinch that 13-year-old Theo Decker recovers from the debris after a terrorist bombing at an art museum kills his mother. Theo carries Dutch master Carel Fabritius’s painting with him wherever he goes on his motherless wanderings, from bunking in with a wealthy Manhattan family to his louche dad’s Las Vegas digs. As Theo realizes the value of the painting, the trouble he could be in when if reveals he has it, and that some scary gangsters are on his tail, this art-centered novel takes on the intensity of a Bruegel painting.

The Art Lover by Carole Maso
This exquisite experimental novel, first published in 1990, weaves images of paintings and drawings, snippets from art history texts, letters, newspaper clippings, photographs, and even fliers for lost pets into the story of a woman’s grief over her historian father’s death and the terminal illness of her friend. As the protagonist, Caroline, explains, “We loved each other so much we felt it necessary, in preparation, to say good-bye our whole lives.”

How to Be Both by Ali Smith
This playful, engaging novel was published in two different versions—one with the contemporary portion first, and one with the historical section first. Either way, the story dazzles. In one half of the book, we meet George—aka Georgia, a British teen—who is mourning her recently deceased mother. Her mother was enamored of the Italian Renaissance painter Francesco del Cossa, and once took her daughter to see his paintings in Italy. The other half of the book is narrated by Francesco—a real figure who, in Smith’s telling, is reimagined as a woman posing as a man so she’ll be at liberty to paint. We learn about Francesco’s life as her spirit floats through contemporary London, keeping an eye on George. This novel is a clever, moving, art-infused gender- and mind-bender.

The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud
Nora Eldridge, the narrator of Messud’s incandescent novel, once dreamed of being an artist, a wife, and a mother. Instead, due to caring for her aging parents and other concerns, she has ended up a single, middle-aged woman with a career as an elementary school teacher. Then she becomes enamored of the family of one of her students, Reza Shahid. His mother is Sirena, an Italian artist who invites Nora to share her studio space and return to her work as an artist, and his father is a Lebanese professor in Boston on a fellowship. Nora is drawn in, wanting to be a part of the Shahids’ lives, but finding Sirena respects no boundaries between art and life.

The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins
In this novel that seamlessly weaves together historical and contemporary fiction, a writer named Marianne Wiggins (who has some biographical overlap with the author) has written a book about Edward Curtis, the famed photographer of Native Americans and other inhabitants of the old West. Some disturbing news about her wayward father sends her on a roadtrip and gets her meditating on the life of Curtis. A section of the book is told from the perspective of Curtis’s frequently abandoned wife, Clara. Clara remembers what her dad told her about artists: “Talent, her father used to say, is more abundant than you think. You have to have the temperament to tolerate hard work. You have to flirt with luck. You have to take the chances that most people wouldn’t take.”