Imagine, if you will, that it’s one o’clock in the morning, and you’ve opened the Wikipedia page for the Vrouw Maria: an 18th Century Dutch shipwreck containing paintings bought by Catherine the Great. You read a bit about the boat, and the day the storm sank, and then you open in a new tab the article about the painter of the lost art. Then about Catherine the Great. Then about the art historian who decided the artist was no good and wrote him out of history, then a later art historian who decided he should be rewritten back into history, and while you’re there you may as well read about the man who founded Washington DC’s National Gallery. Then you read about the diver who discovered the wreck, and then before you know it you’re knee-deep in the legal battle between the diver and the Finnish National Bureau of Antiquities, including maritime law, antiquities law, the European Court of Human Rights, UNESCO Heritage Sites, and somehow, Swedish multi-millionaires.

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That’s what reading this book is like – and it’s not a bad thing at all. It’s everything (and I mean everything – the authors were very thorough) you might want to know about one lost painting, and the events that came before and after it. The book is split into two parts. Part one is about the history of the painting, the painter, and how Catherine the Great came to buy it. Part two is about the modern day attempts to recover the shipwreck and the painting, and the complexities raised by these plans. Prepare yourself, though; no stone is left unturned, and it’s a slow read to get through the sheer amount of detail and background given to us.

That being said, this was – surprisingly – a very gripping read. Although I read it incredibly slowly I felt like I was reading a gripping, page-turner of a thriller, and although that meant I got a little disappointed when I realised how little I’d read after an hour or more of reading, it wasn’t hard to sit down and get absorbed back into the story.

The biggest drawback for me was a lack of citations. For a popular non-fiction book you wouldn’t expect footnotes, but the bibliography was impossible to find on Kindle; I didn’t even know it was there until I found it hidden in the epilogue. When the authors are painting such a vivid story, though, it was hard to know what was fact and what was fiction (or rather, fictionalised fact for embellishment). Especially in the historical chapters people would say things, or feel things, or do things, and it wasn’t always clear how we know this. Did they say it to someone who wrote it down? Was it a diary entry? For the later chapters about people still living, it wasn’t always clear if the people involved had been interviewed by the authors, or if they had used quotes from other interviews, or people’s recollections. Without a way of checking chapter notes or a bibliography, a brief note in the text would have tied the whole thing together very nicely.

This is definitely a niche interest book. If you are interested in the subject matter, definitely pick it up (when you have many hours to spare!). If you’re not, this probably isn’t the book to get you into it. For those of you who do pick it up, though, it’s a treat of a read.

Thank you to the author for providing me with a review copy.