The Pen and the Brush by Anka Muhlstein

Description

What happens when great novelists fall in love with painting? In The Pen and the Brush, award-winning biographer Anka Muhlstein offers a scintillating glimpse into nineteenth-century France’s greatest writers — and the passion for art that shaped their novels.

From Balzac’s fascination with the old masters to Zola’s championing of the Impressionists, from Flaubert’s painterly eye to Proust’s meditations on Vermeer, Muhlstein shows how deeply French literature was steeped in the visual arts. These writers haunted studios and salons, befriended painters, collected art, and argued passionately about aesthetics — and their novels bear the brushstrokes of that obsession.

With wit and penetration, Muhlstein revisits the French novel through a fresh lens, revealing how the dialogue between pen and brush produced some of the most vivid writing ever put to paper. Elegant, erudite, utterly absorbing — a book to savor, preferably with a museum visit close at hand.

What happens when great novelists fall in love with painting? In The Pen and the Brush, award-winning biographer Anka Muhlstein offers a scintillating glimpse into the lives of nineteenth-century France’s greatest writers — and the passion for art that shaped their novels.

From Balzac’s fascination with the old masters to Zola’s championing of the Impressionists, from Flaubert’s painterly eye to Proust’s meditations on Vermeer, Muhlstein shows how deeply French literature was steeped in the visual arts. These writers haunted the studios and salons, befriended painters, collected art, and argued passionately about aesthetics — and their novels bear the brushstrokes of that obsession.

With wit and penetration, Muhlstein revisits the delights of the French novel through a fresh lens, revealing how the dialogue between pen and brush produced some of the most vivid writing ever put to paper. Artists inspired authors; authors immortalized artists.

Elegant, erudite, and utterly absorbing, The Pen and the Brush is essential reading for lovers of French literature, art history, and the fertile borderland where the two meet. A book to savor — preferably with a museum visit close at hand.