For readers of Girl with a Pearl Earring, a luminous and evocative novel of Edouard Manet’s muse.

 

A richly imagined portrait of the young woman who inspired the great Impressionist painter Edouard Manet, Paris Red transports the reader to a world of Parisian cafés, dance halls, flaneurs, and new boulevards.

 

The year is 1862. The place, Paris. The woman who will become known to the world as Manet’s Olympia is a young girl in a threadbare dress and green boots, hungry for life, love, and experience. Victorine and her friend Denise talk to a handsome stranger—a painter—on the street. He buys them dinner, and soon Victorine begins to move through layers of Parisian society, meeting writers and artists including Baudelaire and Alfred Stevens.

 

When Victorine must choose between her friend and her lover, her old life and new possibilities, the history of art is changed forever. Intense, erotic, and beautifully wrought, Paris Red is a novel about the way art transforms us.

Paris Red
by Maureen Gibbon

• Publication Date: April 20, 2015
• Genres: Art, Fiction, Historical Fiction
• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• ISBN-10: 0393244466
• ISBN-13: 9780393244465