The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
Dominic Smith, 2016
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374106683
Summary
A rare 17th-century painting links three lives, on three continents, over three centuries in the last painting of Sara de Vos, an Exhililarating new novel from Dominic Smith.
Amsterdam, 1631:
Sara de Vos becomes the first woman to be admitted as a master painter to the city’s Guild of St. Luke.
Though women do not paint landscapes (they are generally restricted to indoor subjects), a wintry outdoor scene haunts Sara: She cannot shake the image of a young girl from a nearby village, standing alone beside a silver birch at dusk, staring out at a group of skaters on the frozen river below. Defying the expectations of her time, she decides to paint it.
New York City, 1957:
The only known surviving work of Sara de Vos, At the Edge of a Wood, hangs in the bedroom of a wealthy Manhattan lawyer, Marty de Groot, a descendant of the original owner. It is a beautiful but comfortless landscape.
The lawyer’s marriage is prominent but comfortless, too. When a struggling art history grad student, Ellie Shipley, agrees to forge the painting for a dubious art dealer, she finds herself entangled with its owner in ways no one could predict.
Sydney, 2000:
Now a celebrated art historian and curator, Ellie Shipley is mounting an exhibition in her field of specialization: female painters of the Dutch Golden Age.
When it becomes apparent that both the original At the Edge of a Wood and her forgery are en route to her museum, the life she has carefully constructed threatens to unravel entirely and irrevocably. (From the publisher.)