'January 8th, it seems, is not only my birthday, but also the fateful day when the painter Nat Tate contrived to round up and burn almost his entire output. Four days later he jumped to his death from the Staten Island Ferry, thereby completing the ragged circle of his life's events. William Boyd's description of Tate's working procedure is so vivid that it convinces me that the small oil I picked on Prince Street, New York, in the late '60s, must indeed be one of the lost Third Panel Triptychs. The great sadness of this quiet and moving monograph is that the artist's most profound dread - that God will make you an artist but only a mediocre artist - did not in retrospect apply to Nat Tate' David Bowie

'A moving account of an artist too well understood by his time' Gore Vidal

William Boyd is the author of nine novels, including A Good Man in Africa, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice-Cream War, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Brazzaville Beach, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; and Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year.