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3.79 AVERAGE
3.79 AVERAGE
An absorbing story about the choices we make, and how seeking revenge can have unforeseen results that haunt us throughout our lives.
Sara de Vos was the first woman admitted to the painters Guild in Amsterdam in 1631. The daughter of a painter and wife of a painter, Sara specialized in still lives, as women did in those days. However, after a life changing tragedy, Sara finds herself compelled to paint a stark and emotional landscape. In 1957, that same painting is now part of a private collection and is hanging in the bedroom of Manhattan lawyer Marty de Groot.
At the same time, struggling art historian grad student,
Ellie Shipley, is living in a grungy small apartment in Brooklyn, making extra money by restoring old paintings. She hails from Australia and is living a very circumspect life when she is asked to make a copy of a painting called At The Edge of A Wood by a little known Dutch artist named Sara de Vos. Ellie takes on the task willingly, ignoring the fact that she is actually creating a forgery. She works hard to make her copy look as real as possible, and at the same time becomes obsessed with the life and work of de Vos and other Dutch women of that period. Her focus on these painters, and her access to this unknown privately held painting, helps propel her to success as an art historian and teacher.
The novel cleverly travels back and forth in time, giving us glimpses of the life of Sara De Vos as one more of her paintings comes to light. It also exposes the harsh result of the coming together of Marty and Ellie in 1957, as Marty uses a ruse to track down his stolen painting. And finally, the book takes us to a Australia in 2000 where the paintings, Marty and Ellie all come together as Ellie prepares for a retrospective on 17th century Dutch women artists she is curating. As the gallery and Ellie get ready for the exhibit, Ellie must face her history head on as the original, the forgery and Marty de Groot make their way to Australia.
This is a well written novel full of appreciation for artists and their way of seeing the world and for the works of art themselves. It is also a novel well attuned to the nuances of relationships and intricacies of different personalities.
A winter scene at twilight. The girl stands in the foreground against a silver birch, a pale hand pressed to its bark, staring out at the skaters on the frozen river. There are half a dozen of them, bundled against the cold, flecks of brown and yellow cloth floating above the ice. A brindled dog trots beside a boy as he arcs into a wide turn. One mitten in the air, he's beckoning to the girl, to us.
Sara is a Dutch painter living in the 1630s; in fact, she is the first woman to be accepted into the Artists' guild, allowing her to sign and sell her works - as long as she sticks to ladylike still lifes and pictures of tulips. However, when tragedy tears her family apart, and the guild suspends her membership, she must do everything she can to survive. Centuries later, in the 1950s, the only surviving work attributed to Sara is cunningly switched for a forgery, and its owner is determined to retrieve what was stolen from him...and then some. Finally, in the year 2000, an Australian gallery discovers the forgery when both paintings are loaned at the same time.
The painting is stolen the same week the Russians put a dog into space. Plucked from the wall right above the marital bed during a charity dinner for orphans. This is how Marty de Groot will tell the story in the years ahead, how he'll spin it for the partners at the law firm and quip it comedic life at dinner parties and over drinks at the Racquet Club.
I was plunged into the story immediately, and read this gem of a novel from cover to cover in a single day. I could not put it down; I stopped only to eat. The descriptions are so tangible, and the emotional development of the characters is so moving, that they felt completely real to me. I felt like I was watching the forger paint, not reading about it. I felt like I could hear Marty de Groot's breathlessness as he discovers the painting has been stolen. I felt like my heart was breaking along with Sara's. It's an art thriller, in a way. There are false identities, deceit and decades of guilt. There is beautiful scenery, and images that are equally horrific, such as the ominous beached whale that opens our introduction to Sara.
When Barents told them about the talk of the leviathan in the taverns, about his desire to go paint the washed-up animal, Kathrijn's face filled with enormous gravity. It wasn't fear, but steely resolve. For months, she's been plagued by nightmares and bedwetting, by terrible visions in the small hours. "I must come see that, Father," she said earnestly. Barent tried to change the subject, commented that it was no excursion for a girl. For half an hour, it appeared this was the end of the matter. Then, over dinner, Kathrijn leaned over to Sara and whispered in her ear: "More than anything, I want to see the monster die."
The narrative jumps from 1637 to 1958 to 2000 but it is never jolting: it comes at exactly the right time to spur the story along, give a little more background, and reveal the clever links between Sara, whose work is ignored because of her gender, and Ellie, whose own painting was discouraged by a father who believed she was "puttin' on airs". Sensitive to issues of gender, class and cultural differences, this novel will appeal to anyone who liked the first half of the Goldfinch, Girl With a Pearl Earring or The Munich Girl. But beyond its artsiness is a powerful psychological game that unfolds between the owner of the original and its forger.
The threat of being found out makes her want to take stock, to peer into the corners of her life for broader deceits. Is she a fundamentally flawed person? She fixates on small lapses, as if they might reveal something larger... She tries to uncover a breadcrumb trail of moral failure, a trail that perhaps began with her forgery, or even before, with the shoplifting excursions at boarding school.
In fact, I can find no faults with this novel. Not one. It is neatly and cleverly constructed, with the pace accelerating at the end until we see Ellie and Sara standing almost on the same spot, in different times, both geographically and emotionally. It is descriptive without being purple, emotionally charged yet not sappy, immensely powerful in its subtlety. The details regarding the art and forging are interesting without reading like a textbook, and the words slip away from your awareness as you're fully immersed, giving a strong sense of the different times and places in which we are placed. This is an exquisite book and I will absolutely read it again.
Sara brings her gaze back from the low fire beneath the cauldron. "Will it ever go away? The anguish."
"Not ever, as far as I can tell. I just hope the dead feel better about it than we do." She hefts herself up and goes back to the cauldron to give it a stir.
Amsterdam, 1630s Sara de Vos has lost her daughter and her husband leaves so is left in reduced circumstances. A patrons sees a painting Sara did of a barefooted girl watching children skating on a lake (The Edge of the Wood). He sought her out and employers her to paint a model of an abandoned village.
Sara stays with her patron, falls in love with the stable hand and produces more paintings.
Sara's painting is handed down in a family for 300 years and we join the story in New York in the 1950s. Marty de Groot, a successful lawyer owns the painting. One day he notices his painting has been replaced with a forgery and he is determined to find out who has violated his trust.
Ellie is a young Australian art restorer scraping by in New York while finishing her Art thesis. She paints the forgery thinking it is just for security reasons for the the owner.
Marty finds out Ellie did the forgery, befriends her and seduces her. Ellie does not realise Marty is the true owner of the forgery and allows herself to be seduced. Once Marty has done what he wants he abandons Ellie.
Ellie is so hurt and confused she flees to Europe.
Sydney 2000, Ellie is a professor of Art at Sydney University curating an exhibition of female Dutch painters. Both versions of The Edge of the Wood are about to arrive in Sydney as well as the other painting Sara did - The Funeral Procession.
Marty is an old man bringing his painting to the exhibition. He is truly sorry for what he did to Ellie. Ellie is truly sorry for forging Marty's painting. They agree that each has lived a life full of regrets.
The end of this tale ties everything up nicely. I was captivated until the end and thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it.
As was the case in [b:The Goldfinch|17333223|The Goldfinch|Donna Tartt|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1378710146l/17333223._SY75_.jpg|24065147], an enigmatic 17th century Dutch painting is the focus of everything that happens in this novel. In three alternating narratives Smith provides us with a life of the painter, Sara de Vos, a life of its long-time owner, Marty de Groot and a life of the young woman who is called upon to forge it, Ellie Shipley. When the painting is stolen and replaced by a forgery Marty will forge a new identity in order to track down the people responsible for its theft and forgery. These three lives, unfolding respectively in 17th century Holland and 20th century New York and Sydney, will interact on each other with the painting acting as a kind of truth serum.
This is very much a mystery story. The first mystery is the enigmatic painting itself. It’s a depiction of skaters on a frozen river. But there’s a mysterious girl who has left footprints in the snow. “Somehow, she’s walked into this scene from outside the painting” and hovers there like a ghost. What was the inspiration behind the painting? The painting will be the summons to both Marty and Ellie to venture beyond the surfaces of their respective lives. Smith is brilliant at using the layered nature of painting itself to suggest the hidden complexity of any surface. “She has no interest in the composition from ten or twenty feet—that will come later. What she wants is topography, the impasto, the furrows where sable hairs were dragged into tiny painted crests to catch the light. Or the stray line of charcoal or chalk, glimpsed beneath a glaze that’s three hundred years old. She’s been known to take a safety pin and test the porosity of the paint and then bring the point to her tongue. Since old-world grounds contain gesso, glue, and something edible—honey, milk, cheese—the Golden Age has a distinctively sweet or curdled taste. She is always careful to avoid the leads and the cobalts.”
The Last Painting of Sara de Vos very much embraces the traditional values of novel writing. There’s nothing innovative about it nor does it provide startling insights into the human condition. But it’s brilliant storytelling, a real page turner, a quality it achieves largely because of its consistently elegant and eloquent prose and a seamless continuity between the three narratives. All three characters are compelling as individuals struggling to achieve identity.
I especially enjoyed the accounts of Ellie’s restoration work on paintings and the fabulously detailed account of her challenge to forge a 17th century old master painting. Smith describes the art of the forger as “plucking a second self from the folds of history” and this is what will happen to both Ellie and Marty, they will both pluck a second self from the folds of history.
