num_pages: 304
description: 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 his earlier award-winning novels Dominic Smith demonstrated a gift for coaxing the past to life. Now in The Last Painting of Sara de Vos he deftly 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 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's in Holland the first woman to be so recognized. 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 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 The Last Painting of Sara de Vos mesmerizes while it grapples with the demands of the artistic life showing how the deceits of the past can forge the present.
language: English
title: The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
publisher: Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux