The Art Forger

The Art Forger is the fourth book from author B. A. Shapiro. With a PhD in sociology, Shapiro is well known for combining meticulous research with character-driven storytelling. Her academic background shapes her fiction; in The Art Forger, Shapiro approaches art and crime as social and philosophical questions as well as plot devices. Her characters explore questions about why society values certain objects and what the art world’s obsession with reputation and provenance mean about art as a concept.

This guide references the 2013 Algonquin Books paperback edition of The Art Forger.

Content Warning: This guide and the related book discuss themes of suicide and self-harm, substance abuse, and sexual misconduct.

Plot Summary

The novel is primarily narrated in the first person by its primary protagonist, Claire Roth, a gifted but disgraced young painter living in modern day Boston. Prior to the events of the novel, during her last few months of graduate school, Claire’s career imploded after a scandalous love affair with her teacher, the painter Issac Cullion. During their relationship, Claire created a painting under Issac’s name. The painting was lauded as his best work, and Issac became a star. After their brutal breakup, Claire attempted to prove that she was the true artist of the famous work, but her claim was rejected by a panel of experts, and she was labelled a “pretender.” The main events of the novel occur three years later. Claire supports herself by reproducing famous paintings for an online art company. She also paints creatively, and she hopes to win a place in an upcoming exhibition for young artists with her series about windows in Boston.

Claire is contacted by Aiden Markel, a well-known gallery owner who was close friends and professional partners with Issac. He has heard of her talent as a copyist and offers her an ethically dubious deal; to create a perfect copy of one of the paintings stolen in the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, Edgar Degas’ After the Bath. Markel claims to have secured the original, which he is supposed to pass off to an unknown foreign buyer. Instead of doing that, he tells Claire he will sell her copy to the buyer and return the original to the museum. At first, Claire is offended that Markel would ask her to become a forger, but when he offers to give her a solo show at his gallery in addition to a large sum of money, she accepts. The pair quickly develop a close relationship, which becomes romantic after Claire finishes her reproduction of After the Bath.

As Claire meticulously recreates the painting, she notices that the “original” Degas she’s copying has discrepancies from Degas’ normal work, and suspects that the painting is already a fake. She is particularly fixated on the central nude figure, who is not positioned in a way that Degas usually employed. The shadows around this figure also appear to be poorly developed. Claire becomes obsessed with finding out the true history of the painting.

The primary plot of the novel is interspersed with letters from Isabella Stewart Gardner to her niece, Amelia. The letters detail Isabella’s somewhat scandalous friendship with Edgar Degas. By the end of the novel, the reader discovers through these letters and through Claire’s detective work that Degas and Isabella had a secret friendship and that Degas originally included a nude Isabella as the painting’s central figure.

The novel intensifies when Claire’s version of After the Bath is discovered in transit to a buyer in India. Her reproduction is so good that the Gardner Museum verifies it as the original and returns it to its rightful place in the museum. Markel is discovered to be the dealer connected to the sale and is arrested, and Claire again faces the risk of being seen as a fraud and, even worse, being implicated in a crime. At the same time, she has to work to complete her paintings for the upcoming show at Markel’s gallery. She becomes obsessed with figuring out who actually painted the painting that Markel originally brought to her. She befriends Isabella Gardner’s relative, Sandra, through whom she discovers important clues that link the painting to Boston artist Virgil Rendell. Through many twists and turns, Claire figures out that Rendell painted the copy of After the Bath to display in the Gardner Museum after Isabella decided that displaying a nude of herself would be too scandalous. The original is hanging in a secret room in Sandra’s house. By the end of the novel, the original painting has been returned to the Gardner, Claire is a successful artist after her show at Markel’s gallery, and Markel himself is exposed as one of the “crazy” art collectors he often mocks in the novel. He admits he never planned to return the painting and hoped the “original” would remain hidden in his gallery forever.