The Last Painting of Sara De Vos

by Dominic Smith

A profound pleasure of being swept into vivid new worlds, worlds peopled by characters so intriguing and real that we can't shake them, even long after the reading's done. Dominic Smith deftly bridges the historical and the contemporary, tracking a collision course between a rare landscape by a female Dutch painter of the golden age, an inheritor of the work in 1950s Manhattan, and a celebrated art historian who painted a forgery of it in her youth. In 1631, Sara de Vos is admitted as a master painter to the Guild of St. Luke's in Holland, the first woman to be so recognized. Three hundred years later, only one work attributed to de Vos is known to remain-- a haunting winter scene: At the Edge of a Wood. An Australian grad student, Ellie Shipley, agrees to paint a forgery, a decision that will haunt her. Because now, half a century later, she's curating an exhibit of female Dutch painters, and both versions threaten to arrive.

• ISBN10: 0374106681
• ISBN13: 9780374106683
• Publish Date: 5 April 2016
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 26 May 2021
• Imprint: Sarah Crichton Books
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 304
• Language: English

Reviews

[clementine]

This book is really well-written and I enjoyed the prose immensely. The descriptions of the fictional paintings were vivid; it's so difficult to describe one medium using another (I say as someone with a graduate degree in film!), so it's a testament to Smith's impressive skill that I could clearly imagine de Vos's work. The story is also interesting: I can always get behind some art-related plot, à la Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch or Jessie Burton's The Muse.

My biggest issue with this novel is the handling of the historical details. I'm not a huge reader of historical fiction anyway, but I really prefer it when the past is rendered vividly. The 17th Century Netherlands of Sara de Vos's world is simply not as wholly realized as, for example, a similar era depicted in Burton's The Miniaturist. Smith described a painting as being slowly built up in layers, and I understood that the metaphor extended to this story too. However, while Sara's life was interesting, the provenance of the painting had little bearing on the present-day forgery plot. (Again, the flashbacks in The Muse regarding the mysterious painting's creation are integral to the plot.) It felt like a separate novel, one that was not as interesting or complete as the main plot. There were also anachronistic details that bothered me, such as Ellie using the term "cult classic" in the late 1950s. I just wanted each time period to be more evocative of its time, for there to be more evidence of historical research. It's not that the historical framing was ill-developed, it just wasn't fully there, and I wanted this novel to be all-consuming in a way that it just wasn't.

It's a good story with solid writing, though not quite as highbrow or artistically-developed as I think it aspires to be.

[dpfaef]

I don't know what I was expecting when I picked up this book, I thought that maybe Sara de Vos was a real person, now I know she is a composite of Dutch women painters from the 1600's - silly me! This was an absolutely charming story, rather bittersweet.

Dominic Smith has with a mixture of history and deft storytelling woven the lives of three people into a wonderful story of love, loss and redemption. I enjoyed Edoardo Ballerini reading of this book, I felt he was perfect.

This review was originally posted on The Pfaeffle Journal