Tag Archives: the last painting of sara de vos

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos – Dominic Smith

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos - Dominic Smith

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos – Dominic Smith

This novel was recommended (very highly) by several people, so when I saw it in Target for $16 I thought why not? I am so glad I did it is one of my favourite books this year!

Here is the blurb …

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, US-based 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 as a master painter to the Guild of St. Luke in Holland, 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 exhibit 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.

I was swept away (just like the blurb said) I loved all of the different time periods – 17th century Holland, 1950s New York, and Sydney in 2000, all of the descriptions of art, painting and restoration. It was a very visual story and I would love to see it as a movie. It wasn’t just a pretty story though, it was about choices and consequences and responsibility. How lives impact on one another in both good and bad ways.

More reviews …

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/dominic-smiths-last-painting-of-sara-vos-paints-a-tender-portrait/news-story/ef2c6713d04af15760e8cefb3ae3f01b

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/the-last-painting-of-sara-de-vos-review-dominic-smiths-brilliant-art-novel-20160526-gp4sq3.html

http://www.abc.net.au/tv/firsttuesday/s4453040.htm

 

1 Comment

Filed under Fiction, Recommended