Review of THE LAST PAINTING OF SARA DE VOS by Dominic Smith

 4 Stars

I recently finished Dominic Smith’s latest book, Return to Valetto, and I enjoyed it so much that I decided to read an earlier novel of his which I had been on my to-read pile for quite some time.

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos covers three time periods in three different continents.  In New York in 1957, Marty de Groot is robbed of the sole painting attributed to Sara de Vos and left with a “meticulous fake.”  Entitled “At the Edge of a Wood,” the painting has been in his family for over 300 years.  Marty hires a private detective who discovers that the forger was a graduate student of art history, Ellie Shipley.  Marty adopts an alias, Jake Alpert, to entrap Ellie.

In 1637 in Amsterdam, Sara de Vos, the first woman to be admitted into St. Luke’s guild of master painters, paints “At the Edge of a Wood” to help her cope with an unimaginable loss. 

In 2000, in Sydney, Australia, Ellie Shipley, now a renowned art historian, awaits the arrival of two paintings entitled “At the Edge of a Wood,” one the original and one the forgery she herself painted almost 50 years earlier.  One is coming from the Netherlands and one is being personally delivered by Marty de Groot. 

There is sufficient suspense to engage the reader throughout.  What will Marty do when he uncovers the identity of the forger?  Did Sara de Vos paint only this one painting?  Will Ellie’s crime be revealed and her reputation ruined and career destroyed?   

Lovers of art will certainly enjoy this book which examines one painting’s impact on people hundreds of years after its creation.  Personally I loved the parallels between a painting’s canvas and the canvas of a person’s life.  The painting process, and restoration process too, involves the layering of paints just as over a lifetime, we layer on experiences which shape our lives.  The canvases of people’s lives show layers of grime, damage, and the effects of time, so the past cannot be totally escaped. 

Ellie, for instance, after agreeing to “copy” de Vos, has worked hard to hide that choice but “The forgery didn’t stop after she’d handed off the canvas, it continued into the unfolding of years – the plush academic job, the marriage to an art dealer, the publications and curating of exhibits, none of these spoils would have been offered if anyone knew what she’d done. . . . She never stopped painting the beautiful fake.”  Marty admits that he “carries the past around like a bottle of antacids in his pocket. . . . You live among the ruins of the past, carry them in your pockets, wishing you’d been decent and loving and talented and brave.”

I enjoyed the stories of all three characters, especially the examination of their motives.  Anger in fact connects all three:  Sara is angry at her husband’s choices, Marty is angry at “those who wronged him,” and Ellie “recognized her own recurring anger at being overlooked.”  When there are multiple main characters in a novel, I often find one of the narratives less appealing, but that is not the case here.  All three emerge as distinct characters, with both flaws and redeeming qualities, and interesting backstories.

On a personal note, I began reading this novel while on a visit to family in the Netherlands so I loved the description of the Dutch “sturdy, unflappable manner and their occasional brusqueness.”  We visited the seaside village of Zoutelande in the province of Zeeland so I enjoyed the references to “the dunes of Zeeland” where “German tourists can bunk down with their entire brood” since I climbed those dunes and discovered that German is the second language in that area. 

This is a wonderful book which touches on so many human impulses and emotions:  anger, ambition, revenge, deceit, regret.  Full of suspense and memorable characters, it is a work of both creativity and meticulous research.  I highly recommend it.