A surprisingly large number of novels have been written about painters, especially considering that most painters’ lives (other than Caravaggio’s) aren’t very interesting. After all, what makes a painter a painter is mostly non-verbal and doesn’t contain much action. Painting takes place in isolation, during long hours in a studio. And with a few notable exceptions, watching painters at work is about as exciting as watching water drip from a faucet.

Several great novels about painters — e.g., Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, Theodore Dreiser’s The Genius, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence — suffer from seeing the painter through the lens of romanticism. Gulley Jimson, Cary’s boisterous hero, for example, is a lively and real enough artist, but he’s a type — a romantic artist who was a cliché long before Cary came along and invented him.

Even great writers trip up by trying to climb inside a painter’s head when he or she is at work. Whatever it is that’s going on in there during the hours the painter is putting paint to canvas doesn’t translate into words that are worth reading. Worse, when the left sides of painters’ brains actively start up during the act of painting (which happens more than many people realize), they’re as apt to be thinking about getting the damn cat hair out of the paint surface, or whether or not the last fuel bill was paid, as they are to be thinking something profound about form or color.

Some novels about painters, although not particularly great literature, make for wonderful reads. Irving Stone’s The Agony and The Ecstasy and Lust for Life bounce along from beginning to end. But Stone’s books succeed as much from his inclusion of a wide cast of lively supporting characters, and his focus on the rise and fall of his painters’ fortunes, as they do from any penetrating insight into the painter’s mind.

The only novel about painters that really gets at the nut of painters — in part by avoiding trying to climb inside their heads while they’re at work in their studios — is John Fowles’s The Ebony Tower. Published in 1974, the novel was made into a movie with the same name a year later (starring Laurence Olivier and directed by him as well).

Fowles’s novel is about the clash of two radically different kinds of painters — the bourgeois and academic David Williams, and the bohemian, risk-taking, passionate Henry Breasley. Breasley is the intuitive genius, whereas Williams is the intellectually self-conscious plodder. Where Breasley paints because he has to paint, Williams paints because he wants to be a painter. Unlike Breasley, Williams can’t make a move as a painter without looking over his shoulder at other art. The result is that his art is safe but boring.

The difference between the two painters in Fowles’s novel is not unlike Friedrich Schiller’s distinction, laid out in Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, between the Goethe-like, muse-inspired poet and his opposite, the Schiller-like, intellectually intense thinker-poet.

But where Schiller saw both types of poets as making different but essentially equal contributions to poetry, Fowles saw his two types of artists very differently. Breasley is the only true artist. David Williams, on the other hand, is a new type of artist that’s emerged only recently — the contemporary artist, bloodless at his core, whose narrow ambition for fame and attention, and broad tolerance for any and all kinds of art, squeeze the blood out of art. The brilliance of The Ebony Tower comes from its tragic conviction that the deeply passionate artistic soul is a thing of the past.