As we enter another week of lockdown, whether you’re working from home, volunteering, shielding, or self isolating by yourself, with family or housemates, remember to take some time out for yourself.
With the gallery currently closed, you may have found different ways of doing that; for instance, you may be visiting our online programs page, or maybe you’re just kicking back and catching up with some reading. If so, we’ve gathered together a selection of art-related books, mostly novels, set in periods covered by our collections, tailor-made for the avid reader or, in this case, the covid reader.
You can find all the suggestions over at everybody’s favorite multinational shopping site or, if you prefer to support local bookshops, you can find most of them on Hive, a network of local booksellers. That said, let’s dive in shall we…
Our first choice looks at life as a Gallery Assistant and also involves suffragette attacks on art, of the kind that happened at Manchester Art Gallery on April 3rd, 1913…
Asunder by Chloe Aridjis
Art: Detail - Interior View of the Art Gallery by Henry Edward Tidmarsh (c) Manchester City Galleries
Book: (c) Vintage Books
Marie’s job as a museum guard at the National Gallery in London offers her the life she always wanted, one of invisibility and quiet contemplation. But amid the hushed corridors surge currents of history and violence, paintings whose power belie their own fragility. There also lingers the legacy of her great-grandfather Ted, the warder who slipped and fell moments before reaching the suffragette Mary Richardson as she took a blade to one of the gallery’s masterpieces on the eve of the First World War.
After nine years there, Marie begins to feel the tug of restlessness. A decisive change comes in the form of a winter trip to Paris, where, with the arrival of an uninvited guest and an unexpected encounter, her carefully contained world is torn apart.
This next one is a series of vignettes or short stories, starting during the Renaissance. We don’t have many, but some of the earliest paintings in our collection date from this period…
Girl Reading by Katie Ward
Art: Detail of the Virgin and Child With St. Anne and St. John the Baptist (after Leonardo da Vinci) (c) Manchester City Galleries
Book: (c) Virago Books
An orphan poses nervously for a Renaissance maestro in medieval Siena, and an artist's servant girl in seventeenth-century Amsterdam snatches a moment away from her work to lose herself in tales of knights and battles. A woman reading in a Shoreditch bar catches the eye of a young man who takes her picture, and a Victorian medium holds a book that she barely acknowledges while she waits for the exposure.
Next, we have a novel featuring a doll’s house, of which we have a number in our collection, but it could just as easily sit well with our collection of Dutch paintings…
The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton
Art: Doll’s House (c.1850) (c) Manchester City Galleries
Book: (c) Picador / Pan Macmillan
On an autumn day in 1686, eighteen-year-old Nella Oortman knocks at the door of a grand house in the wealthiest quarter of Amsterdam. She has come from the country to begin a new life as the wife of illustrious merchant trader Johannes Brandt, but instead she is met by his sharp-tongued sister, Marin. Only later does Johannes appear and present her with an extraordinary wedding gift: a cabinet-sized replica of their home. It is to be furnished by an elusive miniaturist, whose tiny creations mirror their real-life counterparts in unexpected ways. Nella is at first mystified by the closed world of the Brandt household, but as she uncovers its secrets she realizes the escalating dangers that await them all. Does the miniaturist hold their fate in her hands? And will she be the key to their salvation or the architect of their downfall?
Another couple of books that explore the mysteries of Dutch painters…
Girl with the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
Art: A Woman Seated Smoking A Pipe (c.1650) after Gabriel Metsu (c) Manchester City Galleries
Book: (c) Harper Collins Publishers
Those eyes are fixed on someone. But who? What is she thinking as she stares out from one of the world’s best-loved paintings? Johannes Vermeer can spot exceptional beauty. When servant girl Griet catches his eye, she soon becomes both student and muse. But then he gives her his wife’s pearl earrings to wear for a portrait, and a scandal erupts that could threaten Griet’s future…
The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith
Art: A Lady with Gloves (1660-1655) by Abraham Liets (c) Manchester City Galleries
Book: (c) Allen and Unwin
In the 1600s Sara de Vos, a mother and painter, loses her young daughter suddenly to illness. In her grief, she secretly begins painting a dark landscape of a girl watching an ice skater from the edge of a wood.
In 1950s New York, Martijn de Groot has At the Edge of a Wood hanging above his bed. Though it is a dark, peculiar painting, by a scarcely known female painter of the Golden Age, he holds the painting dear and when it is stolen, he is bereft. In Brooklyn, struggling art student Ellie Shipley accepts a commission to paint an intricate forgery of de Vos' sole surviving work, not realising that her decision will come to haunt her successful academic career.
The next one is very, very loosely inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites (of which we have more than a few)…
Sleep, Pale Sister by Joanne Harris
Art: Vivien (1863) by Frderick Sandys (c) Manchester City Galleries
Book: (c) Black Swan / Transworld
Sleep, Pale Sister is a powerful, atmospheric and blackly gothic evocation of Victorian artistic life. Henry Chester, a domineering and puritanical Victorian artist, is in search of the perfect model. In nine-year-old Effie he finds her. Ten years later, lovely, childlike and sedated, Effie seems the ideal wife. But something inside her is about to awaken. Drawn into a dangerous underworld of prostitution, murder and blackmail, she must finally plan her revenge.
John Singer Sargent is also represented in our collection, and this book explores the story behind one of his most famous portraits (not one of ours unfortunately, and the book’s not a novel, but don’t let that stop you from reading it)…
Strapless by Deborah Davis
Art: Detail - The Albanian Olive Gatherers (1909) by John Singer Sargent (c) Manchester City Galleries
Book: (c) The History Press
The subject of John Singer Sargent's most famous painting was twenty-three-year-old New Orleans Creole Virginie Gautreau, the "it girl" of her day. A relative unknown at the time, Sargent won the commission to paint her.
Unveiled at the 1884 Paris Salon, Gautreau's portrait generated the attention she craved-but it led to infamy rather than stardom. Sargent had painted one strap of Gautreau's dress dangling from her shoulder, suggesting either the prelude to or the aftermath of sex. Her reputation irreparably damaged, Gautreau retired from public life, destroying all the mirrors in her home.
Drawing on documents from private collections and other previously unexamined materials, and featuring a cast of characters including Oscar Wilde and Richard Wagner, Strapless is a tale of art and celebrity, obsession and betrayal.
Stepping into the 20th century, the next couple of books are set against the background of Abstract Expressionism…
Modern Art by Evelyn Toynton
Art: Detail - Red’s New Ball Game No.1 (1960) by Alan Davie (c) the artist’s estate, photo credit - Manchester Art Gallery
Book: (c) Delphinium Books
Belle Prokoff is the formidable widow of the tormented Clay Madden -- an alcoholic, Montana cowboy who blazed through the New York art world and revolutionized it. Blunt, fierce, and scornful of the world's hypocrisy, Belle, a painter herself, has passionately protected her husband's memory since his death in a car accident three decades earlier.
Full of vivid characters and intense confrontations, this highly charged tale moves towards its startling conclusion as Belle battles Madden's would-be biographer and changes forever the lives of the people in her orbit. Inspired by certain principal events in the lives of the artists Jackson Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner, this beautifully written novel imagines dialogue, events, and characters in a fictional universe.
Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut
Art: Detail - Mushroom (1958) by Gillian Ayres (c) Manchester City Galleries
Book: (c) Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group
Broad humour and bitter irony collide in this fictional autobiography of Rabo Karabekian, who, at age seventy-one, wants to be left alone on his Long Island estate with the secret he has locked inside his potato barn. But then a voluptuous young widow badgers Rabo into telling his life story--and Vonnegut in turn tells us the plain, heart-hammering truth about man's careless fancy to create or destroy what he loves.
Lastly, a novel set in the Manhattan art world of the 1960s…
In the Night Café by Joyce Johnson
Art: Cocktail Dress (1964) by Cristobal Balenciaga (c) Manchester City Galleries
Book: (c) Open Road Integrated Media
A haunting novel about the persistence of love and the sustaining and destabilizing power of memories. In the vibrant downtown Manhattan art world of the 1960s, Joanna Gold, a young photographer, meets a painter named Tom Murphy at a party. Rather than another brief collision, their relationship is the profound and ecstatic love each had longed to find. But it's undermined by Tom's harrowing past-his fatherless childhood, his wartime experiences, and most of all, the loss of the two children he left behind in Florida, along with the powerful paintings he will never set eyes on again. Tom, both tender and volatile, draws Joanna into the unwinnable struggle against the forces that drive him toward death. Joyce Johnson brings to life a mythic bohemian world where art is everything and life is as full of intensity and risk as the bold sweep of a painter's brush across a canvas.
If you read any of these, or have already read them, then share your thoughts in the comments below. Or, if you have any art-related novel recommendations of your own, let us know.