The best historical fiction about art and the artists behind it

Your first love is always special, right? This is the book that made me discover how wonderful a fictionalized story behind a familiar piece of art could be.

I loved how personal and meaningful the story was—how it gave life not just to the artist, but to the beautiful, unknown girl whose face is so familiar to us. It is the perfect mix of historical fact and fiction so well blended that the reader can’t tell where one stops and the other starts.

Chevalier has other books along a similar vein, but this one still stands as the best. (And a movie with Colin Firth and Scarlett Johansson is a bonus; you can talk about it with your non-reading friends. But better yet, get them the book.) 

This book masterfully moves between different time periods, the stories of modern museum staff, art dealers and forgers of 30 years earlier, and the life of a little-known Dutch master intertwine into an intricate story that will keep you turning pages.

Like my book, it also explores the roles of women artists in an era where they were marginalized. History has tried to erase women artists and scholars, but if we scratch beneath the surface, we can find them. This book is a nice exploration of what a woman artist’s life would have been during the Dutch Renaissance, and what their work can reveal to us today.

It’s also a great story, full of suspense, intrigue, and the complexity of love and life.

This is a lovely book about the origins of Delft Blue ceramics, and the role of a woman painter in creating it.

Simone van der Vlugt is herself Dutch, and the book has a wonderful atmospheric feeling that puts the reader into the world of 17th-century Netherlands. Like other books on this list, it explores a woman’s role in the art world, but it moves away from painting into the realm of pottery and commerce, as Delft Blue develops to compete with Chinese porcelain coming into Europe at the time.

Plague plays a major role in the book, too, for readers with a morbid fascination of that element of European history.

Not all historical fiction has to be the Renaissance, and not all art has to be painting.

All the Light We Cannot Sea hinges on a diamond, and it breaks the rules of my title in that it is not about the artists, but about the curators who protect it (although they do make copies of the diamond to fool the Germans, so we can bend the rules and call them artists).

If you like historical fiction, you may already have read this 2015 Pulitzer Prize winner, but if not, pick it up (and if so, favorite books are always worth a second read!) The story of a cursed diamond that the Nazis want to capture in World War II, and the people struggling to protect it and survive, is a beautiful, heartbreaking read.

It’s a lyrical story of survival and humanity in the time of war, with unforgettable characters and plenty of suspense. And it features a large, blue, French diamond, so what’s not to love?! 

The most recent of my picks, The Marriage Portrait considers the brief life of Lucretzia d’Medici.

This book has a nicely unpredictable ending, an especially nice surprise, given that it begins with a historical note about Lucretzia’s tragic, early demise and an opening scene only a few hours before that demise.

It then backtracks through the life of an unimportant daughter in the most important family in Europe, and what it meant to be valued only for your potential to form an alliance through marriage to a stranger. But most deliciously, it is the story of a spirited young woman with an eye for beauty, who finds self-expression and resistance in a life controlled first by father and then by husband.

And did I mention, there are a few twists at the end?