It's a checklist of literary whoopee: the art world, jazz clubs, a Mad Men-style Manhattan couple of the 1950s, a woman painter in the 1630s, behind the scenes of the Art Gallery of NSW, a long-kept secret from someone's youth. Flash-forward, it's Ellie in her sixties in Sydney curating an exhibition, awaiting both the original and her own forgery.

We flashback to the circumstances under which the painting originated and see Sara de Vos in 1631, the only woman admitted as master painter to the Guild of St Luke's in Holland. When an heirloom painting is stolen off Marty de Groot's Manhattan walls in 1957, Ellie Shipley, a young Australian living in NYC, is employed by a shady art dealer to paint a fake. The book centres on the influence of a painting on three people across centuries: mid-17th century Amsterdam, the time of the Dutch masters New York in the 1950s and Sydney at the turn of this century. The plot is so rich that the description of it could sound too dense, but Smith weaves his tale with a light touch. The Last Painting of Sara de Vos is the fourth novel by Dominic Smith, an Australian living in Texas. 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.The Last Picture of Sara de Vos, by Dominic Smith. 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 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. The lawyers marriage is prominent but comfortless, too. It is a beautiful but comfortless landscape. 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. Defying the expectations of her time, she decides to paint it. 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. A rare seventeenth-century painting links three lives, on three continents, over three centuries in the last painting of Sara de Vos, an exhilarating new novel from Dominic Smith.Īmsterdam, 1631: Sara de Vos becomes the first woman to be admitted as a master painter to the citys Guild of St.

The last painting of sara devos