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Paris, 1862. A young girl in a threadbare dress and green boots, hungry for experience, meets the mysterious and wealthy artist Édouard Manet. The encounter will change her - and the art world - forever.
At seventeen, Victorine Meurent abandons her old life to become immersed in the Parisian society of dance halls and cafés, meeting writers and artists like Baudelaire and Alfred Stevens. As Manet's model, Victorine explores a world of new possibilities and stirs the artist to push the boundaries of painting in his infamous portrait Olympia, which scandalizes even the most cosmopolitan city.
Manet becomes himself because of Victorine. But who does she become, that figure on the divan?
Intense, erotic, and beautifully wrought, Paris Red evokes the unconventional love story of a painter and his muse that changed the history of art.
"Starred Review. an insightful and riveting account of how Manet and his muse feed off of each other's passion to create something greater than either of them." - Publishers Weekly
"By focusing so closely on the self-absorbed Victorine's inner life and on candid physical descriptions of her sexual encounters with the artist, however, Gibbon gives comparatively short shrift to developing Manet as a character or to exploring the historical context of his work" - Library Journal
"Full of animated scenes of working-class Paris in the 1860s, Gibbon's color-rich prose moves with the deliberate urgency of brushstrokes on canvas." - Booklist
"Fans of art history, Paris and contemporary Künstleromanlike Girl With a Pearl Earring will enjoy the new perspective and the strong female voice." - Kirkus Reviews
This information about Paris Red was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Maureen Gibbon is the author of two previous novels. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the New York Times, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Playboy, Byliner, and elsewhere. She lives in Park Rapids, Minnesota.
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