TITLE: The Painting And The City
A NOVEL by Robert Freeman Wexler
PUBLICATION DATE: July 2009
EDITION: Slipcased Jacketed Hardcover
COVER ART: Jason Van Hollander
PRINT RUN: 100 signed by Robert Freeman Wexler & Jeffrey Ford
INTRODUCTION: Jeffrey Ford
ISBN: 978-906301-54-5
SYNOPSIS:
What is the secret contained in Philip Schuyler's painting? Who was the woman he depicted, the innocent woman and her dark stalker? The Kreunen sisters know, but they must re-bury the past. And Jacob Lerner, artist flailing in a sea of commerce, can only press forward, explore his own art and the mystery of Schuyler's painting, aided and manipulated by an animate marionette of rosy glass...
Manhattan, summer, in the rosy dawn of the 21st century, the sculptor Jacob Lerner sees a painting at a friend's apartment and is drawn into an obsessive search for traces of its long-dead painter, fictional 19th-century artist Philip Schuyler, and his subject, a woman called Madame Burgundy. The search leads to the remains of a once-powerful but still wealthy Dutch-American secret society, and carries Lerner through real and surreal Manhattan streets, buildings, and countryside.
Finding Schuyler's journal draws Lerner in deeper. Finding the dapper marionette makes it impossible for Lerner to escape.
