Ginny, the main character of the st

Ginny, the main character of the story, is 16. She's turning out to be a brilliant artist like her mother, who died when she was a baby. In the extract you're going to read Ginny sees her mother's picture in the art gallery.
When Ginny was first becoming interested in art and the history of painting, Dad had given her a big book with hundreds of reproductions in it. She'd everything the book told her about the Renaissance, and the Impressionists, and the Cubists, about Boticelli and Monet and Picasso. And among the pictures in the book, there were two that made her gasp. One was Whistler's "Arrangement in Grey and Black" , the portrait of his mother sitting on an upright chair, and the other was El Greco's "View of Toledo". She remembered her-It was a physical shock.
And when she looked at the big painting that dominated the end wall, the same thing happened. It would have affected her the same way whoever had painted it, because it was a masterpiece. What it showed was a middle-aged blak man, in a uniform with epaulettes and medals, in the act of falling on to the red-carpeted floor of a well furnished room. He'd been eating a meal, and on the table beside him was a plate of yellow soup. Beyond him, through the open door and at the open window, stood a crowd of people, watching.Some of them carried objects that helped you understand who they were.
And all that was important, but just as important was the strange discord of the particular red of the carpet and the particular yellow of the soup, so that you knew it was something significant, and you guessed the soup had been poisoned. And the way the dying man was isolated by the acid red from every other shape in the picture, so that it looked as if he were sinking out of sight in a pool of blood. And mainly what was important was the thing that was impossible to put into words: the arrangements of the shares on the canvas. There same elements put together differently would have been an interesting picture, but put together like this, they made Ginny catch her breath.
She began thinking of what her mother had wanted to say by the picture. Tell the story of the corrupt officer? Yes... But not mainly. What she had probably wanted to do was just to see what happened when she put that red and that yellow together. That was what could start it. Some little technical thing like that. And the shape of the man as he falls... Because there's no shadow, you can't see easily where he is in relation to the floor. He seems to be floating in space, almost. But at the same time on one could say that the picture wasn't technically correct. It was amazing, brilliant! Ginny felt a lump in her throat.