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Bath and North East Somerset Libraries

Book List: Victoria Art Gallery Staff Recommendations


We have curated a collection of recommended reads from staff at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath. This book list contains adult fiction and non-fiction.

Find out more about the Victoria Art Gallery at https://www.victoriagal.org.uk/.

The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velazquez by Laura Cumming
The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velazquez

Biography & Memoir

The Vanishing Man’ is an innovative dual biography that becomes an unexpected detective story. Travelling from the Spanish and Papal courts of the 17th-century via the courtrooms of 19th-century Edinburgh and the garrets of Manhattan, it is a gripping depiction of how and why great works of art can affect us, even to the point of mania. Most movingly, it is an evocation of some of the greatest paintings of all time by an author who is an eloquent and passionate admirer, and brings us closer to the creation and appreciation of Velázquez’s works than ever before.

The Frequency of Us by Keith Stuart
The Frequency of us by Keith Stuart

Detective and mystery stories

In Second World War Bath, young, naïve wireless engineer Will meets German refugee Elsa Klein; she is sophisticated, witty and worldly, and at last his life seems to make sense – until, soon after, the newly married couple’s home is bombed, and Will awakes from the wreckage to find himself alone. No one has heard of Elsa Klein. They say he was never married. Seventy years later, Laura is a social worker battling her way out of depression and off medication. Her new case is a strange, isolated old man whose house hasn’t changed since the war. A man who insists his wife vanished many, many years before. Everyone thinks he’s suffering dementia. But Laura begins to suspect otherwise.

Features the Victoria Art Gallery!

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
The Goldfinch

Modern & contemporary fiction

Aged 13, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. He is tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, and down the years clings to one thing that reminds him of her: a small, strangely captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld. As he grows up, Theo learns to glide between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love and his talisman, the painting, places him at the centre of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.

Keeping the World Away by Margaret Forster
Keeping the world away

Fiction

Following the fictional adventures of an early 20th century painting, this novel also looks at the women whose lives it touches, and what it means to be a woman and an artist.

The Masterpiece by Emil Zola
The Masterpiece

Fiction

The Masterpiece is the tragic story of Claude Lantier, an ambitious and talented young artist from the provinces who has come to conquer Paris and is conquered by the flaws in his own genius. 

Francis Bacon in Your Blood by Michael Peppiatt
Francis Bacon in your blood

Non-fiction


Michael Peppiatt met Francis Bacon in June 1963 in Soho’s French House to request an interview for a student magazine he was editing. Bacon invited him to lunch, and over oysters and Chablis they began a friendship and a no-holds-barred conversation that would continue until Bacon’s death 30 years later. In this intimate and deliberately indiscreet account, Bacon is shown close-up, grand and petty, tender and treacherous by turn, and often quite unlike the myth that has grown up around him.

Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier

Fiction

An historical novel on the corruption of innocence, using the famous painting by Vermeer as an inspiration. Griet, the young daughter of a tilemaker in seventeenth century Holland, obtains her first job, as a servant in Vermeer’s household. Tracy Chevalier shows us through Griet’s eyes, the complicated family, the society of the small town of Delft, and life with an obsessive genius.

Thunderclap by Laura Cummings

Non-fiction

On the morning of 12th October 1654, in the Dutch city of Delft, a sudden explosion was followed by a thunderclap that could be heard more than seventy miles away. Carel Fabritius – now known across the world for his exquisite painting, The Goldfinch – had been at work in his studio. He, along with many others, would not survive the day. In ‘Thunderclap’, Laura Cumming reveals her passion for the art of the Dutch Golden Age and her determination to lift up the reputation of Fabritius. She reveals the Netherlands, where – wandering the narrow streets of Amsterdam, driving across the flatlands, or pausing at a quiet waterfront – she encounters the rich reality behind the shining beauty of Vermeer and Rembrandt, Hals and de Hooch. This is a book about what a picture may come to mean: how it can enter your life and change your thinking in a thunderclap, a sudden clarity of sight.