Portrait

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'I was transfixed by Portrait' HANNAH ROTHSCHILD‘Imaginative, absorbing, very moving' MICHAEL PALIN'Quietly beautiful, deeply felt' JOANNE BURNBetween 1898 and his death in 1916, the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi painted more than two dozen pictures of his wife, Ida, seen only from the back.This is her story, told from the front.

Copenhagen,1898. Danish painter, Vilhelm Hammershøi is on the cusp of greatness. Nobody knows this better than his wife, Ida, who devotes her days to facilitating her husband's genius.With the news that the great American painter James McNeil Whistler - Vilhelm's artistic idol - is putting together an exhibition in London, the couple relocate to England in the hope of winning his attention.But here things begin to change. Ida and Vilhelm learn that, on the ladder of ambition, it is possible to lose sight of each other, and themselves. And by the end of the year, a devastating betrayal will define the way the world sees Vilhelm - and Ida - forever.

About the author

Francesca Whitlum-Cooper is a curator at the National Gallery where she is responsible for 17th- and 18th-century Italian, Spanish and French paintings. She read English at Cambridge and Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art, before spending three years in Paris writing a PhD about travelling eighteenth-century artists. As Fran Cooper she is the author of two novels, published by Hodder. Her debut, These Dividing Walls (2017) was an unexpected portrait of modern Paris drawn 'with the precision of a painter' and was shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award.