On a moonlit night in Florence a young American meets Theobald, an expatriate painter who talks with enormous eloquence about art and the Madonna he has been preparing to paint for years. Fascinated, the narrator follows him into the city’s galleries and to the house of his model, Serafina, and begins to wonder what the great picture really is.
A short, poignant early tale about ambition and the fear of failure, among James’s finest. Download the free EPUB.