The Portraitist

Listed in the Visual Arts category on Art In Fiction, The Portraitist  (2022) by Susanne Dunlap is based on a true story from the competitive art world of 18th-century Paris.  With a beautiful rival who’s better connected and better trained than she is, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard faces an uphill battle. Her love affair with her young instructor in oil painting gives rise to suspicions that he touches up her work, and her decision to make much-needed money by executing erotic pastels threatens to create as many problems as it solves. Meanwhile, her rival goes from strength to strength, becoming Marie Antoinette’s official portraitist and gaining entrance to the elite Académie Royale at the same time as Adélaïde.  When at last Adélaïde earns her own royal appointment and receives a massive commission from a member of the royal family, the timing couldn’t be worse: it’s 1789, and with the fall of the Bastille her world is turned upside down by political chaos and revolution. With danger around every corner in her beloved Paris, she must find a way adjust to the new order, carving out a life and a career all over again—and stay alive in the process.  “An imaginative work that brings the story of a little-known artist to vivid life.” —Kirkus Reviews Susanne Dunlap is an author of historical fiction for adults and teens, as well as an Author Accelerator Certified Book Coach. Her love of historical fiction arose partly from her studies in music history at Yale University, partly from her lifelong interest in women in the arts as a pianist and non-profit performing arts executive. Her novel The Paris Affair won first place in its category in the CIBA Dante Rossetti awards for Young Adult Fiction.  The Musician’s Daughter was a Junior Library Guild Selection and a Bank Street Children’s Book of the Year and was nominated for the Utah Book Award and the Missouri Gateway Reader’s Prize. In the Shadow of the Lamp was an Eliot Rosewater Indiana High School Book Award nominee. Susanne earned her BA and an MA (musicology) from Smith College, and lives in Biddeford, ME, with her little dog Betty.   Buy Now from Amazon Buy Now from Bookshop Find other novels by Susanne Dunlap on Art In Fiction.