Jessie Burton’s first novel, The Miniaturist, set in 17th-century Amsterdam, read like a lantern-slide show. Her churches were by Pieter Saenredam, her town-houses those of Vermeer and Gerard ter Borch. Her kitchens and corridors and eaves-dropping maids came from Nicolaes Maes. She proved herself a painterly writer with an eye for the telling detail.
The Miniaturist was inspired by a real work of art: Petronella Oortman’s dollshouse in the Rijksmuseum. Burton’s fictional Nella becomes the owner of a dollshouse filled with miniature furniture and family whose movements begin eerily to anticipate — perhaps exert malign influence over — events in the real house.
Burton has pulled off a similar trick in her second novel, The Muse. This time, the object around which the story spins is a painting of ‘Saint Rufina and the Lion’, by — or so we first believe — Isaac Robles, a might-have-been-Miró, a perhaps-Picasso, had he not been killed in the Spanish Civil War.
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