Reviewed by Harriet
Just out in paperback, Lucy Steeds’ debut novel was greeted with much praise when published at the beginning of last year, and was selected by Waterstones as their Book of the Year. Somehow, I missed all this, but was intrigued when I read about it, and decided to review it for the paperback issue.
The prologue is set in 1957 – a woman stands in front of a huge painting, labelled The Feast, painted by Edouard Tartuffe:
A smile flickers across the woman’s face. She remembers the fire. She remembers the stacks of paintings buckling among dancing amber flames. She remembers the acrid smell of smoke and melting varnish. A wall of heat. Paint evaporating into fumes.
From this intriguing beginning, the novel shifts back to 1920. Joseph Adelaide, a twenty-year-old apprentice journalist, has made his way to a remote hamlet in Provence, the home of the famously reclusive painter Tartuffe, or Tata as he is usually known. Tata never gives interviews, and is known never to answer letters, but Joseph has received a one-word telegram in reply to his request, which just says ‘Come’. His editor has agreed to give him a permanent job if he succeeds in writing an article about this artist, whose work he has fallen in love with after seeing one of his paintings in the National Gallery. But once he arrives, he realises the enormous difficulty of this task. Tata is taciturn and disagreeable: “‘Misanthrope’ was one word murmured in art circles, as was ‘hermit’ and even ‘tyrant’. But so was ‘genius’”. He has no intention of answering any of Joseph’s questions, and it appears that this journey was made in vain. But he is told he can stay on if he agrees to model for a painting Tata is embarking on, Young Man with Orange. Initially unwilling, Joseph realises this will be an opportunity to see the artist at work, and so begins a strange period.
This arrangement has been engineered by Ettie – Sylvette – Tata’s niece, who has lived with him since her mother died when she was a small child. She looks after her uncle, cooking, cleaning, dealing with correspondence, arranging the visits of the dealer who comes once a month to collect the paintings he will show and sell in his Paris gallery. It is Ettie who buys the materials Tata needs for his current project: “‘Studies of food. Food on plates . . . food being eaten. The colours and shapes on Ettie’s plate just then . . . the texture…’” he tells Joseph after he has seized a plate of half-eaten tomatoes from the dinner table and rushed off with them to his studio. At first Joseph is obsessed with watching Tata at work, and takes little notice of Ettie. But gradually a relationship develops between them, not easily done as Ettie has many secrets, both in the past and in the present, which Joseph slowly comes to understand and eventually to admire.
Steeds’ prose is lush and descriptive: the sunshine is “buttery”, in the market there are “swollen watermelons, shining apples and a crate of peaches so soft they look like sleeping animals”, the olive trees are “dark and fragrant in their arthritic twists” and Tata’s eye “turns from milky white to fiery amber as the sun pours through the studio window’. But The Artist has something important to say about the way in which female artists were sidelined, patronised or ignored by the predominantly male critical and artistic circles. This was certainly true in the 1920s, and had been for generations before and would be for generations after. I hope it is less true today.
I did enjoy this novel, but would not rave about it as many reviewers have done. There were certainly developments but I suspect most readers would have anticipated them, as I did, and the denouement is not much of a surprise given what happens in the prologue. But Lucy Steeds is undeniably a name to watch and I look forward to her next novel.
Harriet is one of the founders and a co-editor of Shiny.
Lucy Steeds, The Artist (John Murray Press, 2025, paperback 2026). 978-1399819589, 320pp., paperback.
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