This is what we long for: the 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. In this
extraordinary novel, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, Australian
writer Dominic Smith brilliantly 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 Australian art historian who painted a
forgery of it in her youth.
In 1631, Sara de Vos is admitted to the Guild of St. Luke in Holland as
a master painter, the first woman to be so honoured. 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, which hangs over the Manhattan
bed of a wealthy descendant of the original owner. An Australian grad
student, Ellie Shipley, struggling to stay afloat in New York, agrees to
paint a forgery of the landscape, a decision that will haunt her.
Because now, half a century later, she's curating an exhibition of
female Dutch painters, and both versions threaten to arrive.
As the three threads intersect with increasing and exquisite suspense,
The Last Painting of Sara de Vos mesmerises while it grapples with the
demands of the artistic life, showing how the deceits of the past can
forge the present.
