Despite the fraught circumstances challenging all three painters, conflict is lacking. One of the strengths here is the creditable depiction of the painter’s process, in Anna’s case, and the restorer’s art, in Morgan’s. And Anna’s mural of civic pride is decidedly strange. Morgan’s estranged parents are unrepentant boozers. Issues of addiction and mental illness are foremost in both past and present. Martin Drapple, a local portraitist rejected in the competition, is at first a good sport, when he’s sober, until, somewhat too suddenly, he’s neither. She recognizes Jesse’s exceptional talent and mentors him, to the ire of Edenton’s white establishment. Anna has zero familiarity with the South, particularly with Jim Crow. Treasury Department competition, has been sent from her native New Jersey to paint a mural for the Edenton post office. In an alternating narrative, Anna, winner of a U.S. If Morgan misses this deadline, not only is her deal off, but Lisa will, due to a puzzling, thinly motivated condition of Jesse’s will, lose her childhood home. Released on an early parole engineered by Jesse’s daughter, Lisa, Morgan will receive $50,000 to restore a mural painted by one Anna Dale in 1940 in time for a gallery opening on Aug. Morgan Christopher, the last, posthumous recipient of Jesse’s largesse, can’t imagine why he chose her, a complete stranger who is doing time for an alcohol-related crash that left another driver paralyzed. In life, Jesse paid his success forward by helping underdog artists.

In 2018, the recently deceased Jesse has left a very unusual will. The fates of two white painters in Edenton, North Carolina, intertwine with the legacy of a third, that of Jesse Jameson Williams, a prominent African American artist with Edenton roots. A tale of two artists, living 78 years apart in a small Southern town, and the third artist who links them.

Big lies in a small town book review