Here are 26 books that Beauty in Thorns fans have personally recommended if you like
Beauty in Thorns.
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I find the seventeenth century fascinating, and both of my novels are set in that period. The century was a time of great flux, and I am especially interested in exploring the kinds of things that women might have done, even though their accomplishments weren’t recorded. There is a wonderful article by novelist Rachel Kadish called “Writing the Lives of Forgotten Women,” in which she refers to Hilary Mantel’s comments that people whose lives are not recorded fall through the sieve of history. Kadish says that, “Lives have run through the sieve, but we can catch them with our hands.” These novels all attempt to do that.
This book was a phenomenon when it came out, and with good reason.
Chevalier’s words paint a picture of the life of a young girl, Griet, who is working in the house of the artist, Johannes Vermeer in 1660s Delft. In the novel, Griet is the model for the famous painting. The relationship between artist and model, and what they do, and don’t, mean to each other, is complex and intriguing.
The way that Chevalier depicts the restrained interactions between the two seems to mimic Vermeer’s restrained yet visually detailed style.
The New York Times bestselling novel by the author of A Single Thread and At the Edge of the Orchard
Translated into thirty-nine languages and made into an Oscar-nominated film, starring Scarlett Johanson and Colin Firth
Tracy Chevalier transports readers to a bygone time and place in this richly-imagined portrait of the young woman who inspired one of Vermeer's most celebrated paintings.
History and fiction merge seamlessly in this luminous novel about artistic vision and sensual awakening. Girl with a Pearl Earring tells the story of sixteen-year-old Griet, whose life is transformed by her brief encounter with genius . .…
Having spent my entire professional life in the art world as a practicing artist, art historian, journalist, curator, and museum director, and as an avid reader of mysteries, I’m excited when I find fiction in which art and crime coincide. Authentic settings, strong characters, and plenty of deception are de rigeur. The occasional dead body is always a plus, though not strictly required. It’s a specialized genre, but it speaks to me and inspires me to write my own series of art-world mysteries, combining fictional characters with real people from my own background and experience.
What’s the difference between a fake and a copy? Is a copy of a copy a forgery? Based on the famous 1990 Gardner Museum heist, still unsolved, Shapiro’s story peels back layers of duplicity to reveal a shocking deception.
As someone asked to authenticate paintings (which I don’t do!), I appreciated the author’s analysis of the subtleties involved. I sympathized with Claire Roth, her neurotic protagonist, and enjoyed the skewering of art-world pretensions, media-driven reputations, and marketing strategies. Still, I couldn’t help rooting for Claire and her dealer, hoping their clever scheme would succeed.
Almost twenty-five years after the infamous art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum - still the largest unsolved art theft in history - one of the stolen Degas paintings is delivered to the Boston studio of a young artist. Claire Roth has entered into a Faustian bargain with a powerful gallery owner by agreeing to forge the Degas in exchange for a one-woman show in his renowned gallery. But as she begins her work, she starts to suspect that this long-missing masterpiece - the very one that had been hanging at the Gardner for one hundred years - may…
As a history major and artist I noticed a style of illustrations and paintings that popped up in history books, novels, and poetry collections. I found that the paintings and drawings were just scratching the surface. The lives and struggles of the artists known as Pre-Raphaelites were just as intriguing as the art. I have traveled to the many locations that the Pre-Raphaelites frequented to follow in their footsteps. I've even tried to copy their wet white painting style and was awed by the patience they must have had. I appreciate many art styles and enjoy being transported into the lives of the artists by authors as interested in art and history as I am.
An art mystery, a murder mystery. What more could you ask for?
In Madrid, a noted art restorer Julia has received a painting that is itself an intriguing mystery. A fifteenth-century Flemish painting of a Knight and a Duke playing chess. Julia finds hidden under the paint the inscription Who Killed the Knight? That is a secret that was not meant to be revealed. This book is pre-internet so research is leg work. A cast of devious and delightful characters help and hinder Julia's quest to find the answers she seeks and try to avoid becoming a victim of her curiosity. I love the descriptions of art restoration, the ambiance, and the night owl lifestyle of the characters.
The clue to a murder in the art world of contemporary Madrid lies hidden in a medieval painting of a game of chess.
In a 15th-century Flemish painting two noblemen are pictured playing chess. Yet two years before he could sit for the portrait, one of them was murdered. In 20th-century Madrid, Julia, a picture restorer preparing the painting for auction, uncovers a hidden inscription in Latin that points to the crime: Quis necavit equitem? Who killed the knight? But as she teams up with a brilliant chess theoretician to retrace the moves, she discovers the deadly game is not…
As a history major and artist I noticed a style of illustrations and paintings that popped up in history books, novels, and poetry collections. I found that the paintings and drawings were just scratching the surface. The lives and struggles of the artists known as Pre-Raphaelites were just as intriguing as the art. I have traveled to the many locations that the Pre-Raphaelites frequented to follow in their footsteps. I've even tried to copy their wet white painting style and was awed by the patience they must have had. I appreciate many art styles and enjoy being transported into the lives of the artists by authors as interested in art and history as I am.
As Peter Bruegel stands in the Sistine Chapel admiring Michelangelo’s work he realizes he could never compete with one who works in the heavens – above. He will confine himself to the below – the common man. We follow Bruegel and his friends on his journeys, his daily life, and the inspiration he finds in the everyday world around him. His peasants are peasants. Their daily toil is not romanticized. Their feasts consist of rural fare. Even his religious art is not idealized. It is wonderful to imagine that the author has walked in Bruegel's shoes. Rudy Rucker is a professor of math and computer science but his extensive research has brought to life an artist who left very little of his own life to history.
Peter Bruegel's paintings - a peasant wedding in a barn, hunters in the snow, a rollicking street festival, and many others - have long defined our idea of everyday life in 16th Century Europe. In sixteen chapters Rucker brings Bruegel's painter's progress and his colourful world to vibrant life doing for Bruegel what GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING did for Vermeer. We follow the artist from the winding streets of Antwerp and Brussels to the glowing skies and decaying monuments of Rome.
I absolutely love the Pre-Raphaelites, they are my utter passion and these books are the fuel for that fire. Who wouldn't want to be a Pre-Raphaelite woman? Smart, talented, resourceful, these women define what it is to make a mark and great some of the most ground-breaking art in history. I'm particularly obsessed with Pre-Raphaelite women, the artists and muses who created the art we love so much today. After spending almost 30 years researching their lives and loves, it's now my absolute pleasure in telling everyone about these astonishing women, and why we should love them and learn from them.
This is the book that ignited my interest in the Pre-Raphaelite circle and the women who inspired them. Jan Marsh is Pre-Raphaelite royalty when it comes to art history and her work is both pioneering and inspiring. She has gone such a long way to uncover the hidden lives of these incredibly important women and those who have followed her owe her a great deal. This is the book that marked when the women began to be taken as seriously as the men.
Who were those women who sat for the Pre-Raphaelite painters? Muses to an exclusively male genius, of tragic stature and uncertain health - were they indeed as passive as their portrait painters and their critics contrived to suggest? Jan Marsh reveals the actual lives behind the myth of the Pre-Raphaelite women: Elizabeth Siddal, Emma Brown, Annie Miller, Fannie Cornforth, Jane Morris and Georgina Burne-Jones. A meticulous testimony, this book records the rare vitality of these gifted and ambitious women. Delivering them from a century of masculine misrepresentation, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood is a fascinating tribute to their spirit of independence in circumstances…
I absolutely love the Pre-Raphaelites, they are my utter passion and these books are the fuel for that fire. Who wouldn't want to be a Pre-Raphaelite woman? Smart, talented, resourceful, these women define what it is to make a mark and great some of the most ground-breaking art in history. I'm particularly obsessed with Pre-Raphaelite women, the artists and muses who created the art we love so much today. After spending almost 30 years researching their lives and loves, it's now my absolute pleasure in telling everyone about these astonishing women, and why we should love them and learn from them.
One of the founder members of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, is inextricably linked to the women in his life. His beautiful portraits of his sister, wife, and lovers are some of the most recognisable images of the Pre-Raphaelite movement but this wonderful book goes further, uncovering the lives of these women and the context behind these iconic images.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), best known and admired for his striking and seductive portraits of women, was one of the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of artists whose work is inspired by the art of the early Italian Renaissance. Rossetti's powerful and unconventional portraits, with their sumptuous, jewel-like colours, are explored in this beautiful gift book. Examples have been drawn from the full range of Rossetti's work - including paintings, drawings, print illustrations, decorative designs and staged photographs - and chart the artist's lively engagement with mythology, history, literature, biblical subjects and modern life.
I absolutely love the Pre-Raphaelites, they are my utter passion and these books are the fuel for that fire. Who wouldn't want to be a Pre-Raphaelite woman? Smart, talented, resourceful, these women define what it is to make a mark and great some of the most ground-breaking art in history. I'm particularly obsessed with Pre-Raphaelite women, the artists and muses who created the art we love so much today. After spending almost 30 years researching their lives and loves, it's now my absolute pleasure in telling everyone about these astonishing women, and why we should love them and learn from them.
The Pre-Raphaelites were not just limited to the Victorian era, and this is a brilliant exhibition catalogue that explores how we are still loving the Pre-Raphaelites today in programmes like Game of Thrones and movies like The Lord of the Rings. It also reveals the way the 1960s responded to deeply unfashionable Pre-Raphaelite art and how important women were to the Pre-Raphaelites past and present.
I spent two years researching and creating the graphic novel Black Dog: The Dreams of Paul Nash for the 14-18Now Foundations WW1 centenary art commissions, and then touring a live permanence work evolved from the book. We grew up a few miles from each other, and he convalesced after the war where I live now, and I share his sense of place, and we appear to have shared many life experiences, with the obvious exception being his time in the trenches - that was the huge black hole I tried to understand with this work.
More than any other book, this volume of letters between friends, and the unguarded insight they allow, gave me a sense of the man, his rhythms of speech, his manner of expression and his character. Career details and everyday mundanities mix with deeper concerns and the kind of excavation of ideas only really close and respectful friends can express.
This book bears witness to the staying power of Pre-Raphaelitism & illuminates the ambivalent, relatively uncritical response in England to the modern movement.
I absolutely love the Pre-Raphaelites, they are my utter passion and these books are the fuel for that fire. Who wouldn't want to be a Pre-Raphaelite woman? Smart, talented, resourceful, these women define what it is to make a mark and great some of the most ground-breaking art in history. I'm particularly obsessed with Pre-Raphaelite women, the artists and muses who created the art we love so much today. After spending almost 30 years researching their lives and loves, it's now my absolute pleasure in telling everyone about these astonishing women, and why we should love them and learn from them.
The first time I saw a Pre-Raphaelite painting, I was immediately besotted and this was the first book I could find on the subject. Despite being over half a century old, this is the best starting book, filled with images and engagingly written, which will lead to a life-long passion for the subject. It's a handy size and like all the T&H World of Art books, it's an essential part of your Pre-Raphaelite library.
The works of the Pre-Raphaelites are among the best known and best loved of all English paintings, and yet there has long been a tendency to dismiss them as mere Victoriana, and to deny them their proper status as works of art. This pioneering critical history places the movement in its historical setting, relating the individual painters and their art to the larger concerns of 19th-century society. Virtually every Pre-Raphaelite painting is discussed in detail and illustrated here, including works by the best known - Holman Hunt, Rossetti and Millais - and the movement's many minor talents.
I’ve loved Gothic fiction since I was a teen, though back then, I didn’t know it was Gothic. I just liked the creepiness, the often-isolated heroine, and the things-aren’t-what-they-seem murkiness of the stories. One of my first reads was Jane Eyre, which has remained a favorite. Though I didn’t like history in school (too much memorization!), I read several historical fiction books from different eras that fascinated me. These things, combined with another genre favorite—mystery/thriller, led to my first book. It turns out that all those things I’d gravitated to in my decades of reading became the things I most wanted to write about - mystery/thriller historical fiction with elements of Gothic.
Macneal is a go-to for me when it comes to grim reads set in the Victorian era. I found her writing so superb and her grasp of Victorian London and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood so enthralling, it was hard for me to believe The Doll Factory was her debut.
The book is about art and collecting, but the obsession of the book’s villain is what makes this beating heart of a story thrum.
