The art forger

the long version

Almost 25 years after the infamous art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, still the largest unsolved art theft in history, one of the stolen Degas paintings is delivered to the Boston studio of a young artist. Claire Roth has entered into a Faustian bargain with a powerful gallery owner, Aiden Markel by agreeing to forge the Degas in exchange for a one-woman show in his renowned gallery. But as she begins her work, she starts to suspect that this long-missing masterpiece, the very one that had been hanging at the Gardner for one hundred years, may itself be a forgery. This is a novel about seeing, and not seeing, the secrets that lie beneath the canvas.--From publisher description.