The Lost Masterpiece

Shapiro, B.A. The Lost Masterpiece. Chapel Hill, NJ : Algonquin Books 2025. Print.

First Sentences:

I hate spam. Well, obviously everyone hates spam, but I hate it with an admittedly unwarranted ferocity. When I see it, my blood pressure rises, my fingers curl inward, and my jaw throbs. A bit excessive, I know....Unwanted emails and phishing texts are bad enough, but when spam hits my voicemail, my nerves migrate to the outside of my skin and I'm ready to scream. 

Description:

When Tamara Rubin repeatedly receives multiple voice messages on her phone urgently asking her to call for important news, she naturally becomes enraged and deletes them. Finally she returns the call to berate the spammer, only to find out he is a legitimate person from a legitimate organization whose purpose is to recover artworks stolen by the Nazis and reunite them with their rightful owners.

 

Tamara learns she is the inheritor of a long lost masterpiece painting by Edouard Manet. The painting had been newly-recovered from a Nazi storage location. Further research showed it had been given by Manet to Tamara's great-great-great-great-great grandmother, Berthe Morisot, a fellow Impressionist painter who was rumored to have had a love affair with him.

 

So what does one do with an inherited masterpiece worth hundreds of millions of dollars? Of course, Tamara hangs it in her modest apartment to view its engrossing scene of a picnic in the park of ordinary people laughing, playing, embracing, and generally enjoying themselves. 

 

But there are problems. An unknown cousin descended from Manet, informs Tamara that actually he is the rightful owner of the painting and has Manet's will to prove it. Tamara hires a lawyer to fight this claim and cement her own right to the painting.

 

But is it safe hanging in her apartment, without insurance, guards, proper temperature and humidity, and a host of other complications? When her cousin offers staggering amount of money to purchase the painting outright from her to avoid legal battles, how can she refuse? 

 

But the painting speaks to her. She often feels she is part of the figures depicted in the painting, especially her grandmother who is a prominent figure in the work. She even imagines her grandmother winks at her from the painting.

 

Thus begins a dual narrative, one offered by Tamara living in the current age, and one narrated by Berthe herself from the 1800s. Berthe reveal her privileged life, her struggles as a female artist, and her fellow artists and family, some of whom encourage her work while others are shocked by her profession and subject matter. She also reveals her attraction to Edouard Manet which grows daily as she paints in his studio alongside Degas, Renoir, and others attempting to create a new form of art full of color, abstract figures, and unusual settings. They were mockingly referred to as "Impressionists," a name they gradually took on as a badge of pride, and thus started a new movement away from the staid art of the time.

 

This is historical fiction, meaning the characters in Berthe's era are real, as are many of the situations depicted. Beyond that, this is a story imagined by author Shapiro, one which seems perfectly reasonable as it engulfed me the people and era of France in the late 1800s.

 

I loved the story, the creation of the masterpiece painting contracted with Tamara's fight to protect the piece. It is a totally engrossing novel on so many levels, I highly recommend it for art lovers and just anyone who loves a fight for independence and a romance or two set 150 years apart. 

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:]

 Cane, William and Gabrielle, Anna. Every Picture Hides a Story: The Secret Ways Artiss Make Their Work More Seductive.

Fascinating insider research on the background and hidden messages in the works of Berte Morisot as well as Michelangelo, Raphael, Vermeer, Manet, Degas, Cassatt, Kilmt, Van Gogh, Sargant, and many others,

 Happy reading.

Fred

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