Book Review – The Art Forger by B.A. Shapiro

What a marvelous story! I’ve been to the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston, a long time ago when I was a kid, and I remember being amazed at the sheer number of artworks there and the eccentric way they were arranged. It’s a fascinating place, and the fact that its outrageous robbery has never been solved only adds to the genuinely mesmerizing history.

In The Art Forger: A Novel, Ms Shapiro goes into so much fascinating detail about how paintings are made, as well as how they are forged, that I wanted to actually SEE everything she was describing. The Dega’s… I went to google to look up the paintings. And Claire’s window paintings… I want desperately for them to exist so that one day I can see them for myself. This book was so wonderful, it’s hard for me to remember that it’s just a novel.