Elizabeth Kostova, author of the #1 New York Times bestselling The Historian, returns with The Swan Thieves, a spellbinding novel of art and obsession centered on an enigmatic woman who inspires three vastly different men across the centuries.

Robert Oliver, a renowned painter, has attacked a canvas in the National Gallery of Art, lunging at it with a knife before being wrestled to the ground. His only explanation: I did it for her."

Asked to handle the case in part because he is an amateur painter, psychiatrist Andrew Marlow prides himself on being able to make even a stone talk, but even he gets nowhere with Oliver. Retreating into a world of stony silence, all he does is draw, obsessively painting the same woman over and over again. But who is she? Intrigued, Marlow embarks on a journey into Oliver's past in hopes that the woman in the painting can help him understand his tormented patient's psyche. But as he comes face-to-face with the key women in Oliver's life, little does he realize that the most important woman is someone Oliver could never have met--a woman who lived more than 100 years in the past...and who was at the heart of a tragedy that shaped French Impressionism...."

What compelled an artist to attack a work of art?