49 pages • 1-hour read
The Art Forger
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Background
Historic Background: The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Heist
The 1990 robbery of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston is one of the most famous unsolved art crimes in history. In the early morning hours of March 18, two men disguised as Boston police officers entered the Gardner Museum, telling the guard that they had been sent on a report of a disturbance. They tied the guards up and spent the next hour looting the museum, ultimately stealing 13 artworks worth more than $500 million, including 11 paintings, a French Imperial Eagle finial that had been carried into battle by Napoleon’s army, and an ancient Chinese bronze vessel. The works included paintings by major artists such as Rembrandt (his only ocean scene, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee), Vermeer (The Concert, one of only 34 known paintings by the 17th-century Dutch master, believed to be the most valuable stolen object in the world, with an estimated value of $250 million), Degas, and Manet. The paintings were cut from their frames. Several empty frames are still exhibited at the museum, both to remind patrons about the heist and to fulfill Isabella Gardner’s wish that the museum never be changed.
Despite decades of investigation, the works have never been recovered, and the crime now has a solid place in Boston’s cultural mythology. The FBI’s investigation of the case has focused on large criminal organizations, with a particular eye on the Boston Mafia. There was little physical evidence found at the time of the robbery, and although informants within criminal organizations have offered leads and sting operations have been carried out, law enforcement have made no arrests. The museum offers a standing $10 million reward for any information that leads to the recovery of the artwork, with an extra $100,000 reward for any information about the eagle finial. This reward has been increased from a previous $5 million.
Shapiro uses this real historical event as the backbone for The Art Forger. Most of the details that become relevant to the plot, however, are invented. Although Degas painted several works called After the Bath, depicting scenes similar to the one described in the book, the After the Bath that Claire recreates is a fictional painting. Several sketches by Degas were stolen in the heist, but no oil paintings, and the real Gardner Museum has never housed an image from the After the Bath series. This caused some critics to argue that The Art Forger should not have been based on the real crime, since the plot-relevant details are invented. Others felt that framing the story around the real-world crime helped ground the novel in the contemporary world, and that Shapiro’s research ensured that invented details were not outside the realm of possibility.
Literary Background: The Art Heist Novel
The Art Forger occupies a distinctive place within the broader tradition of crime fiction, particularly the sub-genre of art heist novels. Classic crime literature often revolves around solving a murder or unmasking a criminal, but Shapiro reverses the formula: Her protagonist is the criminal, and the central mystery concerns not who committed the crime, but whether it even is a crime. The line between legitimate copying and forgery is very thin, and even Claire herself is not sure which side of it she lands on. Her status depends on the true provenance of After the Bath and on who knew about the original forgery and when. This complexity places The Art Forger in the lineage of complex art crime fiction like Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (2013), the plot of which also revolves around a stolen painting.
The art-forgery motif has deep roots in literature, from works like Honore de Balzac’s Pierre Grassou (1839, the title character is an art forger) to contemporary Dan Brown thrillers. Shapiro revitalizes this tradition by placing a female artist at the center of the story, transforming the trope of the deceitful forger into a story about the challenges faced by women in a male-dominated art world. Claire’s male counterparts repeatedly objectify her, and both Issac and Markel exploit her talent for their own purposes.
Stylistically, the novel straddles genres. It borrows the pacing and tension of a psychological thriller, especially in the middle chapters. Events move quickly, foreshadowing is used extensively, and many chapters end with a big reveal. At the same time, the varied timelines and use of historic letters to drive the plot is a style more commonly found in historical fiction. Shapiro’s detailed depiction of Boston’s gallery scene, art valuation systems, and artistic labor situate the book within the contemporary “literary suspense” movement, a style of writing popular in the 2010s that combines the plot pacing of classic thrillers with the character focus and attention to detail of literary fiction. Critics have noted that Shapiro’s approach resembles novels such as A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990, which also uses embedded historic documents) and Michael Gruber’s The Forgery of Venus (2008).
In the larger history of crime novels, The Art Forger stands out because the primary protagonist is both one of the potential criminals and the primary detective. Claire is ultimately the one who solves the mystery and clears her own name, despite the efforts of the Boston police and the FBI. When viewed in the context of the Gardner Museum heist, this conclusion subverts expectations; a young, unknown artist is able to solve part of a crime that decades of police work have failed to make progress on. This complexity aligns the book with a growing 21st-century trend toward crime fiction as an exploration of the nature of crime and truth.
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