Lisa's Reviews > The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

In his novel The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, Dominic Smith deftly describes what art is for me--whether it be a painting, a novel, a dance, a piece of music, etc.--it is "the possibility . . . of rendering the smoke of human emotion itself."

The conception of the novel began with Smith wanting to highlight the missing painters of the Dutch Golden Age, the women. His fictional character, Sara de Vos is modeled on what he discovered about Judith Leyster (a real life woman painter of the period) and rounded out with research of the time period and his own inventiveness.

Smith interweaves three alternating timelines and locations--1630's Netherlands, 1950's Manhattan, and the year 2000 Sydney. I am engaged and the slow revelations as I smoothly glide in time and place maintain a tension to compel me to keep reading. This format allows Smith to show the history of one painting and the wider story of it's effect on his main characters.

The novel centers around a 17th century Dutch painting called "At the Edge of a Wood" painted by Sara de Vos, the first woman to be admitted to the Guild of St. Luke. It portrays a girl overlooking a frozen river. She's barefoot, and she seems cut off from the reveling skaters down on the frozen river. Sara paints it at a moment of loss in her life; it is a memorial to her 7 year old daughter who dies of the plague. Marty de Groot, a wealthy Manhattan lawyer living in an unhappy, childless marriage, takes a strange kind of comfort in this rather haunting landscape in the 1950's. Ellie Shipley, a student when she first encounters this painting sees the genius and skill of the work; it challenges what she expects to find in a painting by a woman from this time period. And in it, she sees potential for her own career.

The two women protagonists, Sara and Ellie, though separated by centuries both face discrimination in the male dominated art world. In 1630's Holland, men tightly control the Guild of St. Luke, constraining what women are allowed to paint. In the 1950's Ellie leaves Australia and the idea of being an art conservator and heads to the U.S., to begin her career in art history. If not for the sex discrimination she experiences, it is conceivable that Ellie might never have been in the position to forge Sara's painting.

"Something changed in her after that. The anger hardened, came back as a refrain. For years, that moment flickered back whenever she was cleaning or inpainting a canvas--a sense that she had no business engaging in this work. . . . I should have been easy to dismiss--a miserable old man unable to offer a gifted teenage girl a simple compliment. . . She wonders now if the forgery wasn't a form of retribution, a kind of calculated violence--against Jack and Michael Franke, against the old boy network at the Courtauld Institute, against her own indifferent father. But mostly against the girl standing out on the glassed-in veranda who thought her talents were prodigious and therefore enough."

Many of my women friends and I have experienced this type of discrimination. Some of us work harder and move forward. Some stew in bitterness and stagnate. Some plot revenge and damage our psyches. Some give up and stop trying to succeed. And some call the discriminators out and seek fair treatment. This latter strategy is much easier to work with in current times, though it still isn't always effective.

The idea of recognition and authenticity is one of the themes of this book, both of the painting itself and of the characters in this story. Who are we, what do we value, and do we live this way? Smith also looks at barrenness, the inability to have children and the inability to express creatively. How does this affect us?

Smith's characters are real and ring true for their eras and circumstances. His writing is good. A few samples:

“She has no interest in the composition from ten or twenty feet—that will come later. What she wants is topography, the impasto, the furrows where sable hairs were dragged into tiny painted crests to catch the light. Or the stray line of charcoal or chalk, glimpsed beneath a glaze that’s three hundred years old. She’s been known to take a safety pin and test the porosity of the paint and then bring the point to her tongue. Since old-world grounds contain gesso, glue, and something edible—honey, milk, cheese—the Golden Age has a distinctively sweet or curdled taste. She is always careful to avoid the leads and the cobalts."

"Her daughter’s death had loosed something in Sara, a savage kind of grief that burned onto the canvas.”

“The sonic world of the foyer and vestibule comes at him distorted and from a distance, as if someone’s moving furniture underwater.”

I enjoyed my time in the past and with these characters as I uncovered their stories. I learned more about art in the Dutch Golden Era and I learned a bit about forging paintings and how the art world sometimes deals with them. The Last Painting of Sara de Vos is a satisfying read told by a skilled storyteller.