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The Sitters
A sensuously written, peculiar novel about the relationship between a painter and his subject. A narrow, vertical painting, tightly enclosing the scene. Her pale arm and her pale thigh. Viewed at a diagonal through an exceedingly tall doorway . . . just a glimpse of something . . .An ageing portrait artist meets a woman who unsettles him, yet inspires him to paint her. Reluctantly, at first, they are drawn together. The ambiguity of the relationship between painter and subject is revealed through Alex Miller's subtle, sensuous narrative. The artist must watch and wait to trap the shy beast. For the skill of portraiture is in seeing beyond the face, beyond the likeness.
131 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1995
4 people are currently reading
59 people want to read
About the author
Alex Miller
28 books150 followersAlex Miller is one of Australia's best-loved writers, and winner of the Melbourne Prize for Literature 2012.
Alex Miller is twice winner of Australia's premier literary prize, The Miles Franklin Literary Award, first in 1993 for The Ancestor Game and again in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country. He is also an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, in 1993 for The Ancestor Game. His fifth novel, Conditions of Faith, won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the 2001 New South Wales Premier's Awards. In 2011 he won this award a second time with his most recent novel Lovesong. Lovesong also won the People's Choice Award in the NSW Premier's Awards, the Age Book of the Year Award and the Age Fiction Prize for 2011. In 2007 Landscape of Farewell was published to wide critical acclaim and in 2008 won the Chinese Annual Foreign Novels 21st Century Award for Best Novel and the Manning Clark Medal for an outstanding contribution to Australian cultural life. It was also short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award, the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, the ALS Gold Medal and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Alex is published internationally and widely in translation. Autumn Laing is his tenth novel.
Alex Miller is twice winner of Australia's premier literary prize, The Miles Franklin Literary Award, first in 1993 for The Ancestor Game and again in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country. He is also an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, in 1993 for The Ancestor Game. His fifth novel, Conditions of Faith, won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the 2001 New South Wales Premier's Awards. In 2011 he won this award a second time with his most recent novel Lovesong. Lovesong also won the People's Choice Award in the NSW Premier's Awards, the Age Book of the Year Award and the Age Fiction Prize for 2011. In 2007 Landscape of Farewell was published to wide critical acclaim and in 2008 won the Chinese Annual Foreign Novels 21st Century Award for Best Novel and the Manning Clark Medal for an outstanding contribution to Australian cultural life. It was also short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award, the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, the ALS Gold Medal and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Alex is published internationally and widely in translation. Autumn Laing is his tenth novel.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
March 5, 2023
An elegant, stylist novella about the inner self of an aging, successful portrait painter. The artist meets Jessica Keal, a visiting Fellow in the Department of a history at a university in Canberra, Australia. Jessica is an Australian who has not been in Australia for thirty years, residing in Devon, England. Her mother lives on a property in Araluen Valley, two hours drive from Canberra.
The story is narrated by the aging artist. We gain an insight into his creative process, learning briefly about his life, about his father and about his son who he hasn’t seen for ten years.
Here is a random example of the author’s writing style:
‘I was packing up. I went on packing up. She just stood there looking at it. She didn’t say a word. The lack of a figure where she’d been prepared for the first image of herself in oil, sitting there posed on the bed all morning. “It’s not the portrait,” I said, falling into the trap of explaining myself. “I can’t do you yet. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I’m doing. You seem to think I’m planning things. I’m not. I’m just trying things out, I’m putting things down so I can erase them. I’m still at that stage.” (Page 108, Penguin Books Australia).
This book was shortlisted for the 1995 Miles Franklin Award.
The story is narrated by the aging artist. We gain an insight into his creative process, learning briefly about his life, about his father and about his son who he hasn’t seen for ten years.
Here is a random example of the author’s writing style:
‘I was packing up. I went on packing up. She just stood there looking at it. She didn’t say a word. The lack of a figure where she’d been prepared for the first image of herself in oil, sitting there posed on the bed all morning. “It’s not the portrait,” I said, falling into the trap of explaining myself. “I can’t do you yet. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I’m doing. You seem to think I’m planning things. I’m not. I’m just trying things out, I’m putting things down so I can erase them. I’m still at that stage.” (Page 108, Penguin Books Australia).
This book was shortlisted for the 1995 Miles Franklin Award.
June 2, 2015
The sitters is a difficult book to review as it works on many levels. On the storyline level: “An aging portrait artist meets a woman who unsettles him, yet inspires him to paint her. Reluctantly, at first, they are drawn together.”
On a deeper level “the ambiguity of the relationship between painter and subject is revealed through Alex Miller’s subtle, sensuous narrative.” It certainly is! Told through the viewpoint of the painter this is a very unique but sad book. The painter is virtually a recluse who has never even painted family members. He has his commissions, an ex wife that he seems pleased to be rid of, and a son that he occasionally sees. Then Jessica Keal enters his life. In many scenes the painter imagines what Jessica is thinking and feeling:
“This affair of having a portrait painted. Jessica became at once flattered, insecure, vain, unsettled, resisting. She was all at a loss and went off warmed and glowing and scheming how she was going to influence the image of her that I was to bring into being. Not herself.”
On another level, The Sitters is a meditation on art. What is art for one person, is not necessarily art for another. What a sitter expects of their portrait is not necessarily what they will see when the artist is finished. The novel is also (fittingly) about perception. Our perception or memories of childhood. How reliable are they?
Gradually, a little (suggesting subtly a lot) of Jessica’s childhood is revealed when the two of them visit Jessica’s childhood home in the Araluen Valley - isolated and almost primitive. Here is my favourite passage in the book:
“The light hissing dangerously across the garden and the paddocks, and that faint dry shrieking all the time, which never stops, so that you cease to hear it and feel the irritation of the nerves, an abrasion of the senses, pervasive and deep and incurable, or, inexplicably you are soothed by it. It becomes a quality of the silence. And the old woman bent over tapping at the ground, tap, tap, tap, encompassed by the storm of light and noise that’s raging all around her, probing for something in the earth with her iron implement. Engrossed.” So glad that wasn’t my childhood, I tell you.
This is a novel of great subtlety, a tiny tour de force. “It’s not words that shape our intuitions. It’s not in what we say but in what we leave unsaid that we reveal the shape of our deepest motives.”
On a deeper level “the ambiguity of the relationship between painter and subject is revealed through Alex Miller’s subtle, sensuous narrative.” It certainly is! Told through the viewpoint of the painter this is a very unique but sad book. The painter is virtually a recluse who has never even painted family members. He has his commissions, an ex wife that he seems pleased to be rid of, and a son that he occasionally sees. Then Jessica Keal enters his life. In many scenes the painter imagines what Jessica is thinking and feeling:
“This affair of having a portrait painted. Jessica became at once flattered, insecure, vain, unsettled, resisting. She was all at a loss and went off warmed and glowing and scheming how she was going to influence the image of her that I was to bring into being. Not herself.”
On another level, The Sitters is a meditation on art. What is art for one person, is not necessarily art for another. What a sitter expects of their portrait is not necessarily what they will see when the artist is finished. The novel is also (fittingly) about perception. Our perception or memories of childhood. How reliable are they?
Gradually, a little (suggesting subtly a lot) of Jessica’s childhood is revealed when the two of them visit Jessica’s childhood home in the Araluen Valley - isolated and almost primitive. Here is my favourite passage in the book:
“The light hissing dangerously across the garden and the paddocks, and that faint dry shrieking all the time, which never stops, so that you cease to hear it and feel the irritation of the nerves, an abrasion of the senses, pervasive and deep and incurable, or, inexplicably you are soothed by it. It becomes a quality of the silence. And the old woman bent over tapping at the ground, tap, tap, tap, encompassed by the storm of light and noise that’s raging all around her, probing for something in the earth with her iron implement. Engrossed.” So glad that wasn’t my childhood, I tell you.
This is a novel of great subtlety, a tiny tour de force. “It’s not words that shape our intuitions. It’s not in what we say but in what we leave unsaid that we reveal the shape of our deepest motives.”
December 4, 2017
Novella about an ageing portrait artist who lives in Canberra and his reawakening / reenergising through his muse Jessica Keal - a visiting academic. Quite fascinating exploration of the process/work of portraiture and the reconciliation with miserable and lonely childhood and it's reverberations. Though published in 1995, I came across it for the first time last week on the Australian fiction shelves of the library. A gem.
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April 22, 2025Award for The Ancestor Game, The Sitters is a meditation drawn from Miller's lifelong interest in art, focussing on the creative life and the impact of recognition and fame.
There is a plot of sorts, but it's not the focus of the story.
Miller famously migrated to Australia alone at the age of sixteen, and so does his character, who narrates the story. The glimpses of this narrator's family show that he is distant from them and not just geographically. I don't know if the cruelty of the father in The Sitters is an autobiographical portrait... but the reader is advised to be wary about truth anyway...
He acknowledges that his memory of one real imperfect day that left an impression in me of perfection nevertheless... is
The narrator is derisive about this father, describing him as a lackey who kowtowed to members at the club where he was a hall porter. He recognises that this man came back from the war hoping to achieve something with his life, but was cheated of that by marriage and children. Lacking in education and refinement, he spends his retirement binding worthless old books which he never read. Nobody misses him after his death. And yet he for a short time had wanted his son to be an author, an ambition expressly rejected by the narrator...
The narrator, however, who has chosen to make a career in portraiture, is dubious about that too.
To read the rest of my review, please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2025/04/22/t...
There is a plot of sorts, but it's not the focus of the story.
Miller famously migrated to Australia alone at the age of sixteen, and so does his character, who narrates the story. The glimpses of this narrator's family show that he is distant from them and not just geographically. I don't know if the cruelty of the father in The Sitters is an autobiographical portrait... but the reader is advised to be wary about truth anyway...
The truth is — and it's not an easy matter for me to stick to the truth when I'm talking about my father...
He acknowledges that his memory of one real imperfect day that left an impression in me of perfection nevertheless... is
...a delusive little memory, kneaded and pummelled and stretched out endlessly by my longings and my imagination, until it eventually filled a whole period of my childhood and I had transformed it into an endowment worth living for. (p.11-12)
The narrator is derisive about this father, describing him as a lackey who kowtowed to members at the club where he was a hall porter. He recognises that this man came back from the war hoping to achieve something with his life, but was cheated of that by marriage and children. Lacking in education and refinement, he spends his retirement binding worthless old books which he never read. Nobody misses him after his death. And yet he for a short time had wanted his son to be an author, an ambition expressly rejected by the narrator...
There are things that it's impossible to express with words. Language employed to express emotion is a perversion. The records of commerce is the only honest use of written language. The rest is a cover-up. It's not words that shape our intuitions. It's not in what we say but in what we leave unsaid that we reveal the shape of our deepest motives. In the places between the words. In the tacit and implicit. In the silence beyond words. That's where we hide our truth. behind the endless buzzing of language. The sovereignty of silence is its ambiguity. Silence is a power greater than speech. (p.16)
The narrator, however, who has chosen to make a career in portraiture, is dubious about that too.
To read the rest of my review, please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2025/04/22/t...
November 17, 2024
This was a re-read, and I think that I enjoyed it less than I did the first time. It's only a short book, which was a blessing, because so much introspection and evasiveness doesn't bear a lengthy treatment. Its narrator is an elderly, somewhat self-deprecating and yet emotionally frozen painter who has not been able to return to his painting after achieving success with an earlier portrait The Tan Family. ... The painter meets, fleetingly an expatriate academic, Jessica Keal, who has returned to Canberra on a fellowship, and he is instantly attracted to her. After a commission to paint a series of sketches of women, including her, he asks if he can paint her portrait- not just one, but many studies of her, over an extended period of time....The book is titled The Sitters (plural) and although ostensibly it is a slight story about an elderly painter and a younger female sitter, the ghosts of his childhood are sitting, too.
You can read my review, written 13 years ago, when I was obviously more impressed with the book than I am now.
It's at residentjudge.com/2011/04/23/the-sitt...
You can read my review, written 13 years ago, when I was obviously more impressed with the book than I am now.
It's at residentjudge.com/2011/04/23/the-sitt...
June 19, 2025
A novella, bathed in artistic angst, and hung out to dry in the sunshine of ambiguous sensuality, this story is strangely captivating. I can’t really tell you why I found it thus - not a great deal of story, but the truth of it is, the story was in exactly that which was not said. It was an exploration of how we live our lives, artists or not, in ways that can’t be pinned down; a study in the lines of thought trickling through our minds. And all the time we are wondering whether the people around us are feeling, interpreting, seeing things the way we are.
I enjoyed the writing and the tantalising way we were left to draw our own conclusions.
3.5⭐️
I enjoyed the writing and the tantalising way we were left to draw our own conclusions.
3.5⭐️
March 6, 2023
A delightful short story originally published in 1995. Perhaps not quite in the same category as some of Alex Miller's other works but nonetheless, the same quiet descriptions of Australian landscape, this time the Araluen Valley. A story about an ageing artist's relationship with his friend and sitter, with flash backs to his early life. His descriptions of the process by which he produces his art works are detailed and beautiful.
July 20, 2018
This is an interesting books about an aging portrait painter and his models and the reflections on life that painting evokes.
November 24, 2022
A beautifully written novella that explores Art, memory, obsession and the way our interior lives shape our actions. Wonderful use of language by one of Australia's great writers.
November 20, 2022
Delightful. A beautifully written rumination on art, relationships, family. Very gentle & thoughtful. and a fascinating insight into painting.
November 5, 2019
Alex Miller has such a ‘quiet’ way of writing. He gently lulls you along his prose so that it’s not until you reach the end that you realise what he’s said. The Sitters is that type of book. One that is enriched all the more after discussing it’s many layers with friends. I want to read it again, to meander my way though the pages of a story about love, loss, belonging and home.
May 25, 2016
Three and a half stars. I found this to be a gentle small novel that teases out the hidden interplay in a relationship between an artist and a woman who sits for a portrait.
There is an interesting parallel in the structure. She, the sitter, talks to him about her life, while he, the artist, talks to the reader, or himself, about his life.
There are some valuable insights into the life and psyche of an artist in this novel.
There's also a quite fascinating contrast between the easy flow of the writing and the withheld emotion of both the artist and the sitter.
There is an interesting parallel in the structure. She, the sitter, talks to him about her life, while he, the artist, talks to the reader, or himself, about his life.
There are some valuable insights into the life and psyche of an artist in this novel.
There's also a quite fascinating contrast between the easy flow of the writing and the withheld emotion of both the artist and the sitter.
July 10, 2016
This was the first book of Alex Miller's that I ever read and I fell in love. This book led me to his other books, but this was remains my favourite. Little happens, a lot goes unsaid, and the reader is invested in feelings rather than action. Beautifully, Miller releases the ending of the book. He lets it go. A friend who I gave the book to said that she found the ending unsatisfying but I found it revealing of life and that we will not always be fulfilled. An excellent, short, thought-provoking book.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews