Brian Howell

Sight Unseen Brian Howell

In the late 1980s, six characters obsessed with The Proposal, an old master in the National Gallery in London, are unwittingly drawn into a web of intrigue and discovery which propels them on a tour of the great galleries of Europe and into the past. Their fascination is mirrored by the historical origins of this painting, its connection to a new method of depicting reality, and what the resulting work of art conveys to the viewer about the original subjects - the beautiful Cornelia, her controlling father and brother - and about the ambitious painter, Hendrick van Broekelen. Fakery, incest, truth, romance, the intriguing byways of Amsterdam of present and past, the characters' geometric perambulations of Budapest, Vienna, and Prague, the dreariness of London in the 1980s - all these form the backdrop, mis-en-abîme-fashion, to a past world which has a vice-like grip on its protagonists.