Portrait

Between 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. 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.

When the great American painter James McNeill Whistler—Vilhelm’s idol—begins planning an exhibition in London, Vilhelm and Ida relocate to England in the hope of winning his attention. But they soon discover that talent alone is not enough in the fickle, slippery art world, and that on the ladder of ambition it is possible to lose sight of themselves, and each other. When a devastating betrayal threatens to drive them apart forever, Vilhelm and Ida reckon with what it means to really see another person, and to be seen in turn. 

Portrait is a spare, exquisite story of art, ambition, and betrayal. In searing yet vividly rich prose, Francesca Whitlum-Cooper interrogates power and creativity and the secrets we keep from those we love, and from ourselves. 

• "An imaginative exploration of the relationship between the brilliant Danish painter Wilhelm Hammershøi and the mysterious woman in most of his finest paintings, his wife Ida. Whitlum-Cooper tells an absorbing, often very moving story which turns Ida from being a passive onlooker to a feisty, fearless co-creator of some of the most spellbinding paintings of the last hundred and fifty years."
  Michael Palin
• "I was transfixed by Portrait, a novel not simply of a painter and his wife, but of a marriage, an artistic struggle and the complicated dynamics of a family, while somehow avoiding both sentimentality and cliché. Most importantly, Whitlum-Cooper has helped me see Hammershøi’s work afresh. Where before I saw calm, beautiful spaces and lines, I will now see the jagged drama and hardship beneath them. That seems to me an extraordinary thing for one writer to do to another person’s way of looking."
  Hannah Rothschild, author of The Improbability of Love
• "Whitlum-Cooper brings her heroine to life in precise, painterly prose. Portrait is a beautifully written, compelling study of marriage—and what it means to truly be seen."
  Emilia Hart, author of Weyward
• "Whitlum-Cooper’s beautiful, exacting prose both illuminates and preserves the enigma of Hammershøi’s art. Ida, his wife and model, whose back is surely among the most famous backs in art history, is vividly drawn as a collaborator and champion, an agent in her own composition."
  Amy Sackville, author of Painter to the King
• "A carefully composed, richly evocative portrait of a marriage, delicately revealing the scaffolding and hidden labor of the artist's life. Quietly beautiful and deeply felt, Portrait is a novel of process and becoming, and of the essential work that sustains both art and love."
  Joanne Burn, author of The Hemlock Cure