Synopsis
About Iain Pears
See more books from this AuthorHis monologue ranges over the moment when he first knew himself to be an artist, the shameful way he got money for his first trip to Paris, the still undetected fraud he perpetrated on William years ago, and his relations with the painter Evelyn, the prostitute/model Jacky, and the prophetic patr...
| Read Full Review of The PortraitWhile this novel never approaches the sly cleverness and tingling suspense of John Lanchester's A Debt to Pleasure , which it otherwise resembles, readers will enjoy some period ironies, as when MacAlpine expresses contempt for the upstart French Impressionists, while the contemptible Naysmith di...
| Read Full Review of The PortraitMacAlpine, living alone in a hut on a stormy island, far away from anything to do with art, is unable to escape the spirits of two women --- one an artist, the other a model --- who both owe their ruin to Nasmyth.
Jan 19 2011 | Read Full Review of The PortraitA little less sprawling and complicated than Pears’s acclaimed An Instance of the Fingerpost and The Dream of Scipio ( 3 of 5 Stars Nov/Dec 2002), and yet richer and more satisfying than his Jonathan Argyll mystery series, The Portrait is just that—a portrait of a single episode, a single monologue.
Jan 02 2008 | Read Full Review of The PortraitMacAlpine produces a diatribe about the role of the artist and the critic, his feelings towards Impressionist painters, how they are two sides of the same coin, and most important of all, how he plans to ruin Nasmyth especially after the portrait is done.
| Read Full Review of The PortraitYou'll find no corpse, no detectives, no question, really, for quite some time, only a middle-aged Scottish painter, Henry McAlpine, welcoming the distinguished London art critic William Nasmyth to his humble home on the coast of Brittany in 1913, and then painting a portrait of him that he claim...
| Read Full Review of The PortraitAn aggregated and normalized score based on 42 user ratings from iDreamBooks & iTunes