THE LOST MASTERPIECE, BY B. A. SHAPIRO
Have you ever read a book that ended in such sadness, you wished you could rewrite a happier ending for the main character? My first experience with that feeling came after reading Stuart Little to my daughter. As a five-year-old, she was traumatized when Margalo, the bird Stuart is in love with, goes off on migration, leaving little Stuart the mouse alone and unsure as to what his life will be without her. I rewrote the ending to have Margalo invite Stuart to go along with her, with the two of them taking off into the future together. My daughter was satisfied.
Like most of our lives, Berthe Morisot’s included its share of tragedies: war, deaths of family members, heartbreak. But she also had a satisfying creative career, a supportive husband, and a child who was the light of her life. And that’s saying something for an artist who loved light more than anything!
Morisot’s Disappointments
Understandably, there are some parts of any woman artist’s life that we wish could have gone better. And Morisot’s life was no exception. She deserved:
~Access to art training. (The Academy was closed to women.)
~Better working conditions. (Berthe didn’t have her own studio throughout the years of her marriage.)
~More recognition. (Following her death in 1894, she wasn’t brought back into the public eye until the 1960s.)
The Plot
B.A. Shapiro’s The Lost Masterpiece, considers the “what ifs” of Morisot’s life. What if Edouard Manet’s greatest painting, which disappeared during the Nazi occupation of Paris, was actually rescued and hidden by Berthe Morisot? What if the painting landed in the hands of her great-great-great-great granddaughter, who finds herself in the midst of an imbroglio over who is the rightful inheritor or the painting, a descendent of Edouard Manet or someone from Berthe Morisot’s lineage? It’s a battle royale between the Edouard Manet Foundation and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. It’s an intriguing dual-timeline concept, and I am not opposed to considering alternative versions of existing stories.
The Problems
However, there were many fictional details that I did not understand. Why change the names of several real-life characters? I’d say that many Impressionism aficionados are familiar with Morisot’s husband, Eugène, and her daughter, Julie. Giving them different names seems unnecessarily confusing. And, while I’m willing to make huge allowances in historical accuracy to serve the plot, at certain points I have to draw the line at the liberties the author takes with the facts of Morisot’s life. If, for instance, Edouard Manet had picked up Berthe Morisot and twirled her around in the middle of the crowded Paris Salon, in front of his wife and mother, the scandal would have been such that Berthe would have had to leave town or join a convent. And having Berthe’s greatest supporter, her husband, Eugène Manet, perform an act that only the most villainous antagonist stretches plausibility to the breaking point.
Reading this book taught me a lot about art authentication (here’s a use for A.I. that I can get behind), conservation groups, artists’ foundations, and repatriation. How to get a painting into a museum. How to get it out. These in-depth descriptions of the nitty-gritty of the art world sit side by side with paranormal events which occur in relation to the painting. (The latter being an example of the growing expectation that “Historical Fiction Plus” include elements of fantasy, science fiction, or mystery) You may find that these two aspects of the story balance it, or you may find them jarring.
The fictitious painting at the center of the story is Party on the Seine. It seems to resemble Monet’s Luncheon of the Boating Party, with Parisians enjoying an afternoon on a sun-drenched boat. How I wish this were a real work, described in the book as revealing how Berthe Morisot turned her back on the strictures of her society. How gratifying it would have been to read about Morisot’s determination to become a professional despite how unacceptable this was for the daughter of a government official. How she resisted marriage until she was well into her thirties. How she rescued one of Manet’s greatest works, The Execution of Maximillian, from his wife’s plan to multiply her profit from the sale of the painting by cutting it into several pieces. Morisot was a woman who would indeed have rescued a Manet painting. But how did she become that woman?
Interrogating Morisot’s courage to defy her circumstances would have produced a story which left me satisfied.
If you’re curious about the real Morisot—the tragedies she endured, the triumphs she achieved, and the luminous art she created—you may enjoy my own novel, La Luministe: Berthe Morisot, Painter of Light.