The Artist by Lucy Steeds review – mystery and romance in Provence

An aspiring English journalist enters the life of a fabled painter in this seductive debut of art, love and family secrets

A love story wrapped in a mystery, Lucy Steeds’s vividly poetic debut novel begins cinematically and with a prophetic hint of myth: the arrival of a stranger on a dusty road, in his pocket a paper bearing the single-word summons, “Venez”. The year is 1920, in a Europe that is still under the pall of the war that should have ended all wars, and Steeds’s stranger is approaching a remote farmhouse in the Provençal village of Saint-Auguste where fabled painter Edouard Tartuffe – Tata, “the Master of Light” – lives with only his niece Ettie for company.

The newcomer is young Englishman Joseph Adelaide, a disappointed artist and aspiring journalist, in flight from the tragic consequences of a war that has robbed him of his beloved brother and estranged him from his family, after his overbearing father branded him a coward for his conscientious objection. Hoping to begin a new career as a writer on art, Joseph has petitioned Tartuffe for an interview. He asks more in hope than expectation, as Tartuffe is an enigma around whom myths swirl, and has shut himself away from the world for decades. But then the summons comes, and it seems that& Joseph may begin his new life.