Psychiatrist Andrew Marlow, devoted to his profession and the painting hobby he loves, has a solitary but ordered life. When renowned painter Robert Oliver attacks a canvas in the National Gallery of Art and becomes his patient, Marlow finds that order destroyed. Desperate to understand the secret that torments the genius, he embarks on a journey that leads him into the lives of the women closest to Oliver and a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism....

A young girl tours and twirls through museum galleries experiencing different emotions evoked by different styles of art, and then expresses her energy and inspiration when she finds an empty canvas.

A story inspired by Edgar Degas's famous 1878 painting "L'Étoile," or "Dancer on the Stage," in which Sylvie Bertrand, an ambitious young pupil at the Paris Opera Ballet, struggles to keep herself and her dreams alive when the Franco-Prussian War breaks out.