Hurtle Duffield, a precocious child with a ravenous aesthetic hunger, is born into a poor Australian family to whom he feels he does not belong. The wealthy Courtney family adopts him so that he can fulfill their dream of having an intelligent, charming child and so that he can provide companionship to their daughter Rhoda, who suffers from a physical deformity. The Courtneys encourage his artistic impulse and as Hurtle grows up he increasingly finds inspiration in the people around him, beginning with the image of Rhoda's hunchback.
When Hurtle feels stifled by the Courtneys' love, believing it to be too consuming for his artistic desires, he lies to them that he enlisted in the war. In reality he moves to Paris, where he works as a dishwasher and spends time around avant-garde artists. He returns to Australia and lives in squalor, taking menial jobs and painting work as much as he can. Hurtle then has a series of tortured relationships from which he draws inspiration for his body of work: Nance Lightfoot, the prostitute; his wealthy patroness Boo Hollingrake; Hero Pavlossi the Greek mistress; and Kathy Volkov, the violin prodigy, whom he sees as his spiritual child and eventually has a pedophilic relationship with.
Over time Hurtle has great success with art but continues to live an impoverished life, believing it to be the only true way to live as an artist. All of his relationships fail, the women realizing that they are only meaningful to him as subject matter; he never wants more than to live alone and work all day on his paintings, strongly believing that artists can belong to no one. Eventually Hurtle runs into Rhoda, his step-sister whom he has not seen in many years. Also an outsider, Rhoda ends up moving in with Hurtle and the two manage to live peacefully together until his death.
Despite his success, Hurtle continues to work even after he suffers a stroke and after he has been honored with a retrospective. He brings on his protégé, Don Lethrbridge, to help him complete his final work, a magnum opus to God – "God the artist / God the Vivisector," as has been his mantra throughout his life. He dies as he always was: paintbrush in hand, grasping for some higher aesthetic realm.
