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"I loved Tracy Chevalier&amp;#039;s novel Girl with a Pearl Earring and look forward to her new one, Burning Bright. Can you recommend other works of historical fiction focusing on famous names from the art or literary worlds? Margo responds: Girl with a Pearl Earring was a remarkable debut for Chevalier, but she&amp;#039;s not the only author who based a novel on a painting by 17th-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer. Two others are worth noting: Katharine Weber&amp;#039;s The Music Lesson and Susan Vreeland&amp;#039;s Girl in Hyacinth Blue. Weber&amp;#039;s suspenseful and erotic story involves an American art historian and her distant Irish relative who become partners, romantically and politically. The duo conspires to steal the Vermeer work of the novel&amp;#039;s title, which is held by the British crown, and hold it for ransom for the IRA. Weber&amp;#039;s descriptions of the Vermeer are mesmerizing. Vreeland&amp;#039;s series of interlocking stories are not based on an actual Vermeer painting, but an imaginary one inherited by a man whose father was a Nazi. Beautifully written (and my favorite of the trio), the work traces the fortune of the painting -- which features a girl in a blue smock -- backward through time. Each story focuses on another of the painting&amp;#039;s owners until it arrives at the moment when the artwork was first conceived. Vreeland followed this Vermeer-inspired novel with two others based on lesser-known artists: The Passion of Artemisia, told in the voice of Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi, who was the first woman elected to the Accademia dell&amp;#039;Arte, and The Forest Lover, based on the life of Canadian painter Emily Carr. Her latest, Luncheon of the Boating Party, due out in May, also focuses on an artist and a single painting: the masterpiece by French painter Auguste Renoir of a party of 13 people dining on a riverside restaurant terrace. Juggling the story of Renoir with those of his 13 models, the novel is a tour de force. Chevalier also went on to write, among other subjects, novels that combine fascinating art history and great storytelling. Try The Lady and the Unicorn, based on the six medieval tapestries hanging in the Museum of the Middle Ages in Paris. The details of who created these tapestries and why are unknown, so Chevalier deliciously fills in the void with her imagination. Not only do you feel transported to the time of noblemen and ladies, you learn a lot about 15th-century weaving. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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