Spanning 300 years of art history and weaving art styles including Cubism, Surrealism, and the Baroque into his prose, Jake Kendall's collection tells the stories of those with an obsession for creation artists who sacrifice friendships, careers, romance, and even their own happiness in pursuit of a vision.How far would you go for the sake of art?In these 8 illustrated short stories, Monet, Van Gogh, Géricault and others navigate the boundary between art and experience through masterfully written prose that reflects each artist's style. The collection culminates with "The Vanitas", where Sandro Signorelli's philosophy that a lifetime of faith and toil shall receive its just reward is challenged by the emergence of a new artist. Across town, Michelangelo Merisi is making seismic waves. The city of Rome cannot help but be captivated by this explosive eruption of talent, swagger, seduction, and violence, while Sandro's life is plunged into crisis by a rival who does not even know his name.

Jake Kendall is a graduate of the University of Edinburgh's MSc programme in Creative Writing. His own obsession with art began during a happy period working for the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archeology in his hometown of Oxford. Since then, art history and fiction have become twin passions that have fuelled and inspired his imagination.When he is not writing fiction Jake writes for the Edinburgh International Culture Summit, an organisation that brings cultural ministers together with leaders from the arts world, academics, and activists, focussing on issues of global urgency with the aim of affecting positive change through cultural policy.