Portrait in Red: A Paris Obsession

The quest to uncover the history of a mysterious painting, and a joyous exploration of art in the twentieth century.

While wandering the streets of Paris in 2015, L. John Harris found an abandoned, unfinished, and strangely compelling painting. The subject: a girl wearing a bright-red head covering, fixing her viewer with a foreboding gaze. The painting bore no signature, only the date: January 12, 1935. Harris embarked on a multi-year quest to uncover the story behind this painting. His sleuthing grew into Portrait in Red, a wide-ranging exploration of art and its enduring mysteries. With wit and self-aware enthusiasm, Harris traces unexpected connections among Paris on the eve of World War II, bohemian life in the San Francisco Bay Area, the aura of original paintings, the collecting of found objects, and the search for the perfect croque sandwich. Portrait in Red will delight lovers of Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes or Michael Finkel's The Art Thief. By turns heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny, it is an existential detective story, one that begins in historical tragedy but ends in joyous comedy.