In 1960s Italy, a dying artist - a recluse, and an enigma to strangers and loved ones alike - begins his last painting. In Cumbria thirty years later, a landscape artist - and admirer of the Italian painter - finds himself trapped in the extreme terrain that has made him famous. And in present-day London, his daughter, an art curator struggling with sudden grief while planning an exhibition about the lives of the twentieth-century European masters, is drawn into a world of darkness and sexual abandon.