The Artist, Lucy Steeds
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE 2025
Set in a farmhouse in Provence in the 1920s, The Artist is about Joseph, a journalist, who spends the summer with elusive artist Edouard Tartuffe and his niece, Ettie. Over the course of the book, we get to know both Joseph and Ettie intimately as they discover themselves and the connection between them.
This is such a viscerally written book that it’s difficult not to immediately surrender yourself to it. Though I read it in winter with a hot water bottle on my back, I couldn’t help but feel the excruciating warmth of the summer. I could see the art so clearly, just as I could taste the feasts. Lucy Steeds has an incredible talent for pulling us in, for appealing to our senses. She often describes emotions through food references, with unexpected notions such as an egg cracked on a back, adding to the overall deliciousness of the book.
It’s no surprise, then, that I was convinced Tartuffe was a real artist I had somehow missed from my art history education – that’’s how engrossed I was in this book, how enamoured with its characters. And the more we love the characters in this book, the more they reward us. There is such subtle yet significant transformation in the way Joseph and Ettie see themselves and others, all the things hidden in plain sight that they choose to overlook. And there is a slight mystery element too, not one we can’t guess, but one that makes readers itch for the satisfying reveal that will confirm all our suspicions.
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