Dimensions
127 x 203 x 15mm
In New York, a seventy-five-year-old artist, Austin Fraser, is creating a new series of paintings that recall the details of his life and of the lives of those individuals who have affected him - his peculiar mother, a young Canadian soldier and china painter, a First World War nurse, the well-known American painter Rockwell Kent, and Sara, a waitress from the wilderness mining settlement of Silver Islet, Ontario, who became Austin's model and mistress.
From the barren, wintry shore of Lake Superior through World War I France to the New York of the twenties and thirties, 'The Underpainter' is Jane Urquhart's classic and unforgettable novel. It is a portrait of the artist as a young manipulator, captured as the painter confronts his ghosts in old age, and a work of stunningly vivid visual pictures and illuminations of humanity beneath the surfaces that staunchly defy exploitation.
