The Painted Kiss

by Elizabeth Hickey
Atria, April 2005
288 pages
Translation: Inkwell Management

Rights sold to:
World English rights to Atria (April, 2005)
Greek rights to Fantastikos Kosmos
Korean rights to Yedam
ANZ rights to Hodder Headline Australia
Polish rights to Bertelsmann Warsaw
Dutch rights to Sirene
Serbian rights to Okean
German rights to Bloomsbury Berlin
Spanish rights to Sum

In her passionate and atmospheric debut novel, The Painted Kiss, Elizabeth Hickey reimagines the relationship between Gustav Klimt and the woman whose name he uttered with his dying breath.
Vienna in 1886 was a city of elegant cafés, grand opera houses, and a thriving and adventurous artistic community. It was there that twelve-year-old Emilie Flöge met the con-troversial libertine and painter Gustav Klimt. When Klimt is hired by Emilie’s bourgeois father to give her some basic drawing lessons, he introduces her to a subculture of dissolute artists, wanton models, and decadent patrons that both terrifies and fascinates her.
The Painted Kiss follows the developing relationship between Klimt and Emilie, who blossoms from a naìve girl to a sanguine woman, becoming mistress to one of the twentieth century’s most fascinating artists and the owner of an exclusive fashion house, which Klimt helps design. Fin de siècle Vienna glitters with wealthy, beautiful women for Emilie to dress in her salon and for Klimt to undress in his studio. It is a world overflowing with the greatest artists, composers, and writers of the era, and yet doomed by the imminent collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Although she is never sure of her place in Klimt’s life, Emilie is a constant presence, supporting him through tragedy, self-doubt, triumph, and scandal -- and ultimately serving as the model for his greatest masterpiece.
The Painted Kiss is a moving love story that is as sensual and compelling as a work by Klimt himself.

About the author:
Elizabeth Hickey was an art history major at Williams College and earned her MFA from Columbia. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband. Visit her website at www.elizabethhickey.com

Quotes and reviews:
“A graceful imagining of the joined lives of a rising, soon-to-be-famous artist and a young woman in fin-de-siècle Vienna.”--Kirkus Reviews

“Hickey’s language is sensual, lush and unhurried, and the prose wears its author’s research gracefully.”
--Publishers Weekly

"In Elizabeth Hickey’s compelling novel of tempestuous lives amid the tawdry bohemia of artists’ studios and the glittering innuendo of Viennese café society, longing pulses from the page. The Painted Kiss is vivid, atmospheric, engaging, and very, very real."--Susan Vreeland, author of Girl In Hyacinth Blue

A selection of Borders Original Voices and the Barnes & Noble On-Line Book Club, THE PAINTED KISS is a sexy fiction debut about the life-long affair between Austrian painter Gustav Klimt and his muse, the couturier Emilie Floege, whom we first meet when Emilie’s father commissions Gustav to paint the child Emilie’s portrait. Light, sensuous, diverting and very good company. Recommended by BookSense.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* This first novel, which springs boldly to the reader’s attention as an admirably accomplished, beguilingly effortless story, is based on the lives of two actual historical figures. Hickey takes us back to the lush elegance of fin-de-siecle Vienna, "the most beautiful, cosmopolitan city in the world"--back to when the emperor still ruled divinely yet the arts were breaking old barriers. Gustav Klimt, a denizen of Viennese bohemia, has already made a painter’s name for himself when a well-to-do businessman commissions him to draw his young daughters’ portraits. Thus the lives of this permanent fixture in the world’s artistic firmament and his mistress-to-be, Emilie Floge, intersect. Alternating flash-forwards to mid-World War II, when the Old World truly crumbled and Klimt was long dead, frame the story with a perfect nostalgia for the novel’s "real" time: the beautifully expressed charting of the growing relationship between Klimt and Emilie, who eventually runs a fashion house in the Austrian capital and dresses all the ladies of the arts world. Hickey possesses a comfortably secure voice in sharing her understanding of the nature of this unsordid affair and her knowledge of the glamorous but teetering-on-the-edge time and place. Brad Hooper
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"The Painted Kiss is richly atmospheric and haunting."
-- Lauren Belfer, author of City of Light

- The Wayward Muse
The beautiful and steamy follow up to The Painted Kiss, The Wayward Muse tells of the love triangle among William Morris, Jane Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the pre-Raphaelite world of mid-19th century England. Jane Morris fell madly in love with Rossetti upon meeting him at the theatre, but Rossetti was otherwise romantically involved. Compelled by her mother and poverty to marry Rossetti’s shy and dreary acolyte William Morris, Jane suffered in a loveless (on her part) marriage until her husband leased a country house for the three of them and promptly left on a trip to Iceland. Jane and Rossetti spent many idyllic months there together, cut short when Rossetti suffered a mental breakdown and Jane was forced to return to William in London. Though their relationship was never the same, Jane Morris and Rossetti remained close. She was his favorite model for the rest of his life. CD