The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Australian novelist Dominic Smith (Bright & Distant Shores) is a mesmerizing and magically faux historical novel. It revolves around the meticulous forgery of a haunting Dutch Golden Age painting, and the loss, deceptions and love in the lives of the artist who painted the original, the wealthy New Yorker who owned it and the young woman who forged it.
The narrative dips gracefully between centuries to tell the interwoven stories of its three characters. Gifted artist Sara de Vos, in 1631, is the first woman admitted to the Guild of St. Luke as a master painter, but she's also a working woman struggling with debt and her own profound losses. Ellie Shipley, a lonely Ph.D. student in Brooklyn in 1957, consults for collectors and takes on restoration work to make ends meet when an art dealer persuades her to copy a rare de Vos called At the Edge of the Woods. Marty de Groot is a wealthy New York lawyer and descendant of the original owner; he is hosting a party when the painting is stolen and replaced with a fake so convincing it takes him six months to see the substitution and embark on his own deceptions to exact revenge.
Fifty years later, Ellie is a prominent curator in Sydney preparing an exhibition on female Dutch Golden Age painters when she learns that both versions of At the Edge of the Woods are on their way--the original from a Dutch private collector and her own forgery, personally delivered by Marty de Groot. Helpless with foreboding and regret, she's convinced her secret is about to be revealed.
The Last Painting of Sara de Vos is steeped in the arcana of forgery, technique and history. Seventeenth-century Amsterdam and Haarlem are as vibrantly alive as mid-century Brooklyn and contemporary Manhattan. Yet the novel avoids being weighted by research. The characters never feel as though they are the puppets of history. In no small part, this is due to Smith's use of invented characters and paintings rather than historical ones. It's a neat way to underscore his theme of authenticity and masquerade, and allows him to focus on his characters' reactions to their circumstances, rather than on ensuring they bend to the historical record. As a result, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos is a splendid thing: a riveting mystery set in the rarified world of art collection about a stolen masterpiece and a gorgeous, haunting novel rooted in history, an incandescent achievement of literary imagination. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer
Shelf Talker: The landscape painting at the center of this gorgeous novel becomes an emblem of the longings and losses, deceptions and loves of its contemporary owner, its forger and its Dutch Golden Age creator.