Fic­tion

The Lost Masterpiece

  • Review
By – July 3, 2025

A. Shapiro is well known for her books about the art world, such as The Mural­ist and The Art Forg­er. Each of these books fea­tures a hero­ine who solves a mys­tery involv­ing a paint­ing or paint­ings. The Lost Mas­ter­piece fol­lows this same pat­tern, and is sure to become anoth­er favorite with readers.

The sto­ry is told by four nar­ra­tors: Berthe Morisot, a con­tem­po­rary of Manet and, in the sto­ry, his lover; Aimée, her daugh­ter; Colette, Aimée’s daugh­ter; and Tama­ra, their present-day descen­dant. Tama­ra receives news that she has inher­it­ed a new­ly dis­cov­ered Manet, Par­ty on the Seine. When she takes pos­ses­sion of the paint­ing, strange things begin to hap­pen. She is also sued for the paint­ing by a rel­a­tive of Manet’s. The book cov­ers the sto­ries of the four women over time, with most of the book focus­ing on Berthe’s career as an artist, and Tamara’s strug­gle to keep the paint­ing and find out its true provenance.

Berthe’s chap­ters show the severe restric­tions put on a woman artist in the late nine­teenth cen­tu­ry. Morisot is a real per­son, con­sid­ered one of the best, but least-known Impres­sion­ists. In her time, female artists were seen as an odd­i­ty, and few were tak­en seri­ous­ly. Women’s artis­tic ambi­tions were con­strained by unwrit­ten rules that dic­tat­ed what they could paint (most­ly land­scapes and domes­tic scenes).

In the parts of the book nar­rat­ed by Aimée and Colette, Shapiro writes in a more for­mal style, which at times bor­ders on the turgid. In the Tama­ra chap­ters, the prose is live­li­er and the last third of the book, which focus­es large­ly on Tamara’s strug­gle to find out who real­ly paint­ed Par­ty on the Seine, moves quick­ly. Shapiro incor­po­rates a lot of infor­ma­tion on the Morisot and Manet fam­i­lies, who were close­ly con­nect­ed in real life. She also includes depic­tions of Degas, Mon­et, and oth­er Impres­sion­ists, as well as their strug­gles to be rec­og­nized by the crit­ics of the time.

The Lost Mas­ter­piece is well-researched, imag­i­na­tive, and full of intrigue and romance.

Jill S. Beer­man grew up in New Jer­sey and attend­ed Mont­clair State Uni­ver­si­ty. She has a doc­tor­ate in Amer­i­can Stud­ies from New York Uni­ver­si­ty. She taught high school and col­lege for twen­ty-five years. 

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