43 Novels Featuring Art

This installment of the Riot Recommendation is sponsored by Asunder by Chloe Aridjis. Marie’s job as a 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 of the Gallery surge currents of history and violence, paintings whose power belies their own fragility. There also lingers the legacy of her great-grandfather Ted, the museum guard 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 open. _________________________ Whether you’re into Ocean’s 11-style art heist stories, tales of tortured artists, or fiction that takes its inspiration from works of art and the people who make lives and livings creating them, you’ve no doubt found yourself lost in a book–a written work of art–that is largely about other artistic media. We asked you to tell us your favorite novels that feature art and artists, real or invented. Here’s what you came up with:  The Forgery of Venus by Michael Gruber The Passion of Artemisia, Girl in Hyacinth Blue, and Life Studies by Susan Vreeland The Art Forger by B.A. Shapiro Sacre Bleu by Christopher Moore Cascade by Maryanne O’Hara Theft by Peter Carey The Recognitions by William Gaddis An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin The Brutal Art by Jesse Kellerman The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Costova Asylum by Patrick McGrath Lust for Life and The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone The Gravity of Birds by Tracy Guzeman The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham The Book of Evidence by John Banville My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok The Masterpiece by Emile Zola Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert Vandover and the Brute by Frank Norris The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie The Disenchantments by Nina LaCour The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner Murder as Fine Art by David Morrell Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut Tell The Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt The Art of Murder by Jose Carlos Somoza I am Madame X by Gioia Diliberto The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan The Sarantine Mosaic (duology) by Guy Gavriel Kay Memory and Dream by Charles de Lint The Fallen Angel by Daniel Silva And Only to Deceive by Tasha Alexander What’s Bred in the Bone by Robertson Davies Notes From An Exhibition by Patrick Gale Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood  A Nearly Perfect Copy by Allison Amend The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde _____________________ Sign up for our newsletter to have the best of Book Riot delivered straight to your inbox every week. No spam. We promise. To keep up with Book Riot on a daily basis, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, and subscribe to the Book Riot podcast in iTunes or via RSS. So much bookish goodness–all day, every day.