Painter to the King

This is a portrait of Diego Velázquez, from his arrival at the court of King Philip IV of Spain, to his death 38 years and scores of paintings later. It is a portrait of a relationship that is not quite a friendship, between an artist and his subject. It is a portrait of a ruler, always on duty, and increasingly burdened by a life of public expectation and repeated private grief. And it is a portrait of a court collapsing under the weight of its own excess. Unfolding through series of masterly set-pieces and glancing sketches, this is a novel of brilliance, imagination and sheer style -- about what is shown and what is seen, about art and life.

What especially thrills is Sackville's style, which revels in risk and play ... In Painter to the King Sackville has written not only by far the finest novel of its kind that I have ever read, but one of the finest historical novels of recent years. For her skill and daring, her grasp of both subject and form, and her masterly chiaroscuro of human failure and endeavour, she is as distinct among her peers as Velázquez was among his, Working in luminous and meticulous prose, Sackville achieves an almost miraculous intimacy with her subject. Painter to the King is the most engrossing fictional study of visual art I have ever encountered, giving us not only a persuasive account of Velázquez's formation and milieu but a ravishing survey of the very substances and textures of his sensory world. It is, in its own right, an astonishing work of art, Sackville writes beautifully, imagining the court in painterly detail: its fashions, its stultifying formalities, its hierarchies and petty, poisonous rivalries. She has the art os weaving Velázquez's works [...] through the developing relationship, even friendship, of Diego and Felipe... Painter to the King is stately, [...] Sackville's summoning of time and place is exquisitely done, Sackville's sumptuous verbal artistry both fills history's gaps, and offers via its kaleidoscopic language a response to the paintings' ever-shifting qualities... The novel flecks its pursuit of the artist, across paintings and documents, with the shimmer and dazzle of its rhapsodic prose, The kind of novel that makes you fall in love with reading all over again: rich, kaleidoscopic, evocative and hugely moving. Painter to the King renders the past in intimate, exquisite, enthralling detail

Amy Sackville was born in 1981. She studied English and Theatre Studies at Leeds, and went on to do an MPhil in English at Exeter College, Oxford, and an MA in Creative & Life Writing at Goldsmiths. Her first novel was The Still Point, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize and won the 2010 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and her second was Orkney, which won a 2014 Somerset Maugham Award. www.amysackville.co.uk