Novels about artists, composers, writers - any great ones?

I wish I had better "news" to report but I am just not warming up to Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs, as I am now 25 percent (as measured by Kindle - thanks, guys) through and so far nothing, nothing, has happened - it is all back story, this rather drab and uninteresting narrator recounting her life up to age 40 in the most generalized and sanitized manner, with a some details about one single incident - a boy in her class (she teaches grade 4) is bullied and she befriends the boy's mother, Reza, and they rent an art studio together and she, the narrator, is starting to have feelings of sexual attraction to Reza, which confuse and disturb her. Wow, a long way to go so far for very little payback. I may be missing something, and on the basis of Messud's solid track record - I loved The Emperor's Children  - I will read further. Her narrator is an aspiring artist, frustrated that she has not been recognized for her talents, though there's no way for us to assess those talents - she describes her current project which is making dollhouse miniature models of the rooms of famous women writers, e.g. Dickinson, Woolf (on eve of her suicide). This "concept" sounds pretty derivative to me, and it's not clear that these dollhouses would be great works of art in any case - but this may be Messud's point, perhaps her narrator is too constricted and inhibited to ever become a great artist. It's hard to write about art in literature (or literature or music, for that matter) - I've tried with no particular success, and few writers are able to bring this off well. I think of the terrible, boring failure of The Children's Book, for example. How many great examples are there of novels about artists/composers/writers? And I'm not counting ones in which the artist/writer is an avatar for the author (e.g., the Zuckerman novels or Portrait) or in which the novel is based on a real artist or author or authors (e.g., the Pat Barker novels or The Master). Top of the list would be Doctor Faustus. Maybe some elements of Search for Lost Time. Others?