The Artist

A woman stands before a painting called The Feast in London's National Gallery. The year is 1957. The painting depicts a table laden with food, some rotting, with no one present. A plaque identifies the artist as Edouard Tartuffe, the "Master of Light," and notes this is the only work to survive a fire that destroyed his studio in 1920. The woman remembers the fire. She remembers setting it herself.

The story jumps to the summer of 1920. Joseph Adelaide, a 20-year-old English journalist, arrives at a remote farmhouse in southern France carrying a letter bearing one word, Venez (Come), apparently signed by Tartuffe, a reclusive painter he has never met. Joseph hopes to write a profile for The Inkling, the fledgling art magazine where he works under editor Harold "Harry" Makepeace. At the farmhouse he finds Tartuffe on the back terrace, a man of about 60 with a frothy grey beard and one milky eye. Tartuffe has no knowledge of Joseph's coming. He calls for his niece Sylvette, known as Ettie, who inspects the letter and says, "Here is your Young Man with Orange." Tartuffe offers a deal: Joseph may stay, but only if he sits as model for a new painting. Joseph accepts.

Ettie, 27 with cropped hair and work-worn hands, has lived at the farmhouse her entire life. She runs the household and prepares the studio each day for the man she calls Tata, the household name for Tartuffe. The novel alternates between Joseph's and Ettie's perspectives, and through Ettie's chapters a history of deprivation emerges. Her mother, Gabrielle, Tata's sister, left when Ettie was seven and died abroad; her coffin was returned months later. Ettie taught herself to cook as a small child. Tata systematically destroyed anything that gave her happiness: He banished her only childhood friend and killed a pet goldfinch she had nursed back to health. Through these acts, Ettie learned to be silent, invisible, and obedient.

Joseph settles into sitting for Tata, holding an orange in a white smock, forbidden from speaking or moving. Art became his refuge after his mother's death from the Spanish flu two years earlier; she introduced him to Tartuffe's work. His older brother Rupert is hospitalized with shell shock after the First World War, and Joseph himself had a nervous collapse after his mother's death, was dismissed from the Slade School of Fine Art, and became estranged from his father over his pacifism.

As weeks pass, Joseph and Ettie draw closer. She teaches him to see food as an artist does, selecting fruit for color rather than taste. One afternoon she helps Joseph understand Tata's painting by framing his vision with her hands: "You are not holding fruit. You are holding colour." The insight unlocks his writing. When Young Man with Orange is finished and a celebration follows, Joseph wanders outside late at night and sees a flickering light in a stone outhouse. Through the window he watches Ettie set the painting on fire. The next morning it sits on its easel, whole and framed. Raimondi, Tata's Parisian art dealer, collects it and drives away. Joseph finds no trace of fire, and when he confronts Ettie, she dismisses what he saw as hallucination. "You saw nothing," she says.

Joseph's article generates a record sale, and Tata agrees to let him stay. As Tata begins a large new canvas depicting a feast with no diners, Joseph and Ettie's relationship intensifies in secrecy. They share their first kiss by a stream after a village dance, and their bond deepens through stolen moments. One afternoon, after Joseph is forced to kill a chicken, Ettie leads him to the stream and washes the blood from his skin. Harry sends Joseph a camera, and the pair take a double-exposure photograph together by an olive tree: two overlaid figures, the landscape visible through their bodies, their hands just touching.

A dinner party with American visitors becomes a turning point. Peggy Guggenheim, an art collector, engages Ettie in passionate conversation and reveals that women have been admitted to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, the prestigious Parisian art school, for years. This shatters a lie Tata told Ettie as a child: that only men could study there. The restriction was only ever on Ettie. Peggy leaves her card, and Ettie hides it beneath a loose floor tile.

Weeks later, Joseph joins Ettie in the outhouse at night and discovers the truth. Two identical paintings sit side by side on the easel. For three years, Ettie has been forging every painting that leaves the farmhouse as Tata's, copying his work with perfect precision and destroying the originals. The forgery began after the death of Amir, an Algerian soldier she loved, killed in the war. Shattered by grief and unable to create original work, she found that copying calmed her mind. The practice became a private rebellion, the only way to get her art into the world, since the same painting would be worth a fraction under her own name. She asks Joseph to choose which painting is hers; he cannot tell. She forces him to pick one and strikes a match, burning it. Ettie also confesses that she forged the letter that brought Joseph to the farmhouse, writing "Come" and signing Tata's name. Tata never knew Joseph was coming.

Night after night, Joseph watches Ettie work on her copy of The Feast, painted from memory because the canvas is too large to move. He urges her to leave with him, but she resists, trapped between love and resentment for the uncle who is her only family. Tata inadvertently reveals that Ettie's father was Paul Cézanne, the Post-Impressionist painter who was Tata's mentor and closest friend. Cézanne's affair with Gabrielle drove Tata to abandon Paris and exile himself to protect his sister from scandal.

Ettie finally breaks through her creative paralysis, painting an original work: a swirl of yellow and gold that Joseph recognizes as a portrait of her inner self. She sends her original paintings to Peggy Guggenheim in Paris. After visiting her mother's grave, she resolves that her next life must be one she chooses for herself. She then engineers the crisis she knows must come, planting a photograph of herself in a vase Tata will use. When he finds it, Tata erupts in fury, shredding Joseph's photographs and possessions. Both men smell smoke.

Ettie has set fire to Tata's studio, destroying every painting, including his original Feast. She piles canvases and props onto a bonfire, splashing turpentine as fuel. At the last moment, smoke filling her lungs, she staggers out into the light. Her own version of The Feast waits in the outhouse, differing in one detail: She has added a 13th chair and a bowl of perfect peaches, giving herself a place at the table. She throws her body forward and starts to run.

The novel returns to 1957. Ettie walks the corridors of a gallery filled with her own paintings. She pauses before a canvas titled A Beginning; for her it captures the memory of washing Joseph's bloodied shirt in the stream. She has visited The Feast at the National Gallery the day before; Tata's name is on the plaque, but Ettie reads it as a twisted admission that her work equaled his. On her studio wall hangs the double-exposure photograph of her and Joseph, their hands touching, the sky visible through their hearts. Her exhibition features a quote: "Everything inside me is on the canvases. My life is in the paint." Ettie reflects that small freedoms taste most like liberation: walking out her door, food chosen for taste, her own studio. She looks out at the world and invites the world to look back.