"The hero of The Unknown Masterpiece, Frenhofer, is one of Balzac's archetypal artists, a man who has worked for years on a painting he has concealed from friends and admirers. . . . 'Who,' asks the art critic Dore Ashton, 'was Frenhofer?' thus propelling a ruminative essay into a kind of art- critical detective story. . . . It is her gift to throw us back again into looking, hearing, reading all that is best not only in our own time, but in those periods of the previous century which inform much of life with the desire to experience, to discover what we don't know."
John Spurling, Times Educational Supplement
"Dense with facts, quotations and cross-references, one of those stimulating arguments which sets mental hares jumping in all directions."
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