Washoe County Library System

Psychiatrist Andrew Marlowe, devoted to his profession and the painting hobby he loves, has a solitary but ordered life. When renowned painter Robert Oliver attacks a canvas in the National Gallery of Art and becomes his patient, Marlow finds that order destroyed. Desperate to understand the secret that torments the genius, he embarks on a journey that leads him into the lives of the women closest to Oliver and a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism....

"Rome, 1955. The artists gather for a picture at a party in an ancient villa. Bear Bavinsky, creator of vast canvases, larger than life, is at the centre of the picture. His wife, Natalie, edges out of the shot. From the side of the room watches little Pinch - their son. At five years old he loves Bear almost as much as he fears him. After Bear abandons their family, Pinch will still worship him, striving to live up to the Bavinsky name; while Natalie,...

Al Kinloch, a young painter who lives in seclusion on a Scottish mountain is called to London to save his family from financial ruin. It happens after the director of the family brewery embezzles the funds. Far from being a babe in the woods, the painter does an excellent job.

A British stockbroker abandons his wife and career to pursue a simple life as an artist in Tahiti. Charles Strickland rebels against his life as a London stockbroker and decides to abandon civilization and his family to pursue a career as a painter in the South Pacific. Inspired by the life of the French painter, Paul Gauguin, Maugham portrays a 19th century gentleman who abandons his profession and family to pursue his art in Paris. Through this...

On a spring afternoon long ago, thirteen-year-old Wyn Davies took a shortcut through the woods in her New Hampshire hometown and became a cautionary tale. Now, twenty years later, she lives in New York, on the opposite side of a duplex from her ex, with their four-year-old daughter shuttling between them. Wyn makes her living painting commissioned canvases of birch trees to match her clients' furnishings. But the nagging sense that she has sold her...