The Jewel

✍ Scribed by Neil Hegarty

• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 204 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

**'Striking ... Hegarty has gifted us a vital book for our time. Bathed in light, seeped in colour; it is full of the act of being mortal - in a landscape that is - slowly, finally - finding what it means to be human' IRISH TIMES. **

A surprising and ambitious work of fiction centred on the art world, featuring an artist who has become an art thief, an obsessive curator and a specialist in major art thefts. Their stories intersect with the fate of a legendary work by a tragic Victorian woman artist who painted the picture as a kind of funeral dress, using the notoriously fragile distemper technique.

At the heart of this moving and unusual novel is a strange painting by a woman who committed suicide rather than live with neglect and pain. Her final glowingly beautiful work was painted with a technique more usual for posters and banners, and not designed to last. She intended it as her shroud. It hangs in a Dublin gallery, and it is...