Word: painterly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...life as in his art, Constable was a late bloomer. At the age of 33, he fell in love with Maria Ricknell, the 21-year-old granddaughter of a crusty, wealthy Stour Valley rector, who threatened to cut her out of his will if she married the impecunious painter. Prudently, Constable and Maria waited seven years. Finally, in 1816 his father died, leaving him with enough of an inheritance at 40 to marry and support a wife and children (they had seven). Virtually all Constable's greatest paintings were done after his marriage...
Next, a gang of thieves try to bully Fidelman into art forgery. He proves to be possibly the first copyist in the world with painter's block. But when he finally does manage to complete a counterfeit of Titian's Venus of Urbino, he likes the fake so much that he steals it back from the thieves in preference to the real thing. Skillfully Malamud somehow turns this gesture into a superbly comic act of integrity...
Fidelman is a failed painter who has bummed enough money from a married sister for a year in Italy. Intending to make a cosmopolite and a critic of himself in his middle age, the boy from The Bronx has bought a tweed suit and a pigskin briefcase and begun a book on Giotto...
...reminded of the Jewish past he cannot shake by an absurd incarnation of the Wandering Jew named Shimon Susskind, wearing knickers and peddling rosary beads to the tourists at St. Peter's. When Susskind steals Fidelman's briefcase and burns the Giotto manuscript, he forces the ex-painter to reclaim another part of his grubby old identity -the role of impoverished artist...
...Wandering Jew himself, Fidelman goes out to face the comic disasters that life has waiting for him. He falls in love with Annamaria, a female painter distinguished mostly for her distracted eyes and tense neck, who rewards him by alternately treating him as a chore boy and a father-confessor, but almost never...