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With its concatenation of vignettes and northern European milieu, the novel’s canvas resembles a feminist take on those hectic old Flemish masterworks — teeming with the faces and bodies of women agonized by childbirth, domestic violence, economic hardship, sexual secrets and more.

The National Gallery of Art offered a genteel soundtrack to its extensive collection of old Flemish masters Sunday.

Sylvia looked at this child with her fair hair, who but for the agony and fear in her blue eyes would have been like one of those rapturous angels in old Flemish pictures.

In Ghent, the favourite city of the Emperor Charles V., in the old Flemish city heavy with fortifications, rises remote, far from noisy streets, Sainte-Barbe, the grey-walled Jesuit monastery.

"Have a cigar," said the Master, as he liked to be called, pushing across the refectory table that had come out of an old Flemish monastery a primitive box painted with scenes of saintly temptations, but lined with cedar wood and packed full of fat Corona Coronas.