The Lost Masterpiece

The New York Times bestselling author of The Art Forger delivers another riveting art history thriller.

In an utterly compelling novel about an enigmatic painting, B. A. Shapiro tells a story filled with thrilling plot twists, taking us deep inside a circle of famous painters in late-nineteenth-century Paris, centering on the anguished Impressionist artist Berthe Morisot—the one woman in their midst who never got her due—and the story of Morisot’s great-great-great-great granddaughter, Tamara Rubin, who has inherited Édouard Manet’s Party on the Seine, a painting that completely upends her life. When Tamara inherits Party, she discovers a long-hidden family history replete with unanswered questions: How had it been stolen by the Nazis? How had the painting managed to survive three disasters that destroyed every other artwork around it? And most of all, why had she never known about her ancestor, Berthe Morisot? As the painting begins to metamorphose into darker and more terrifying versions of itself, Tamara’s ordinary life—until now untouched by art—is thrown into turmoil. What wounds and resentments plagued Morisot, and to what lengths will her spirit go for revenge?

The Lost Masterpiece is a story of love, adultery, betrayal, family secrets, and the grueling birth of Impressionism, taking the reader on a whirlwind adventure from the streets of Paris in the late 1800s and the studio Berthe Morisot shared with Manet, Degas, and Renoir at a time when it was improper for women to paint seriously to the present day. Shapiro brings Berthe’s world to life, tracing her work through generations of descendants and introducing us to a painter as brilliant and original as her male counterparts.

Across 150 years of triumphs, struggles, passions, animosities, and malevolence, Shapiro does what she always does so brilliantly: shows us how art can enliven our senses and enlarge our world.

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