The underpainter

"In Rochester, New York, a seventy-five-year-old artist, Austin Fraser, is creating a new seies of paintings that recall the details of his life and of the lives of those individuals who have affected him--his peculiar mother, a young Canadian soldier and china painter, a First World War nurse, the well-known American painter Rockwell Kent, and Sara, a waitress from the wilderness mining settlement of Silver Islet, Ontario, who became Austin's model and mistress"--Back cover.