Portrait
Francesca Whitlum-Cooper author
Format:Hardback
Publisher:HarperCollins Publishers
Publishing:11th Mar '27
£16.99
This title is due to be published on 11th March, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
An exquisite and enthralling novel of art, ambition and betrayal 'Quietly beautiful and deeply felt’ JOANNE BURN, author of The Hemlock Cure
Between 1898 and his death in 1916, the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi painted more than two dozen pictures of his wife, Ida, seen only from the back.
This is her story, told from the front.
‘An absorbing, often very moving story’ MICHAEL PALIN
'Quietly beautiful and deeply felt' JOANNE BURN, author of The Hemlock Cure
Copenhagen,1898. Danish painter, Vilhelm Hammershøi is on the cusp of greatness. Nobody knows this better than his wife, Ida, who devotes her days to facilitating her husband’s genius.
With the news that the great American painter James McNeil Whistler – Vilhelm’s artistic idol – is putting together an exhibition in London, the couple relocate to England in the hope of winning his attention.
But here things begin to change. Ida and Vilhelm learn that, on the ladder of ambition, it is possible to lose sight of each other, and themselves. And by the end of the year, a devastating betrayal will define the way the world sees Vilhelm – and Ida – forever.
‘An imaginative exploration of the relationship between the brilliant Danish painter Wilhelm Hammershoi and the mysterious woman in most of his finest paintings, his wife Ida. Whitlum-Cooper tells an absorbing, often very moving story which turns Ida from being a passive onlooker to a feisty, fearless co-creator of some of the most spellbinding paintings of the last hundred and fifty years’
MICHAEL PALIN
‘I was transfixed by Portrait, a novel not simply of a painter and his wife, but of a marriage, an artistic struggle and the complicated dynamics of a family, while somehow avoiding both sentimentality and cliché. Most importantly, Whitlum-Cooper has helped me see Hammershoi’s work afresh. Where before I saw calm, beautiful spaces and lines, I will now see the jagged drama and hardship beneath them. That seems to me an extraordinary thing for one writer to do to another person’s way of looking’
HANNAH ROTHSCHILD, author of The Improbability of Love
‘A carefully composed, richly evocative portrait of a marriage, delicately revealing the scaffolding and hidden labour of the artist's life. Quietly beautiful and deeply felt, Portrait is a novel of process and becoming, and of the essential work that sustains both art and love’
JOANNE BURN, author of The Hemlock Cure
ISBN: 9780008835934
Dimensions: 222mm x 141mm x 21mm
Weight: 270g
304 pages