The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith: book review

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (2016) is a true account of artist Sarah van Baalbergen (1607-?) during the period of the Dutch Golden Age from the early to mid 1600s.

In 1957 a painting, At the Edge of a Wood (1636) by Sara de Vos, is stolen from the home of Marty de Groot during a charity dinner. It is the only surviving painting of the first woman to be admitted to the Guild of St Luke in Holland in 1631. How was the precious painting taken out of the house? Did a guest steal it from under his nose? Did his wife Rachel, whom he is distancing himself from, have anything to do with the theft?

Readers are transported back to Amsterdam in 1636 when Sara de Vos sees a ‘young girl trudging through a snowy thicket above a frozen branch of the Amstel. Something about the light, about the girl emerging alone from the wood, rouses her to the canvas.’ It was a time when female artists did not paint landscapes because it entailed long hours spent alone outside. She’s supposed to be painting tulips.

Ellie Shipley is a young Australian art restoration consultant, specializing in Dutch women painters of the Golden Age, and living in New York city. In 1957 she is commissioned to forge a Dutch painting.

By 2000, Marty de Groot is about 80 years old, and Ellie is back in Australia curating an exhibition of seventeenth-century Dutch women painters, when she learns that two paintings from two different hemispheres with the same name by the same artist are on the way to Australia for the exhibition. Marty de Groot is bringing one of the paintings in person. Ellie has an instant migraine. How could that happen? Which painting does de Groot have – the original or the fake? And will the forgery be traced back to her?

Constructing the narrative back and forth in time, although sometimes annoying, Smith builds the tension of the ‘big reveal.’ When Marty and Ellie come face-to-face, the dialogue is cutting. Someone has to tell the truth, or do they continue lying? Deceit is double-edged in this intriguing, suspenseful novel.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).