gilmoreguide 's review for:

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith

4.0

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It’s hard to believe that something as benign as an art exhibit entitled Women of the Dutch Golden Age could be the nexus for such widespread themes as art history, abandonment, love, grief, forgery, and intrigue, but in Dominic Smith’s new novel The Last Painting of Sara de Vos it is. Eleanor Shipley is an esteemed professor at Sydney University and a well-known scholar of seventeenth century female Dutch painters. She is also the curator of the exhibit, which will be displaying the only known painting by Sara de Vos, the first female member of the Guild of St. Luke—the only way an artist could paint for a living in Holland in the 1600s. Her painting, At the Edge of a Wood, has been owned by Martin de Groot’s family for three hundred years and hung in his bedroom until it was stolen and replaced with a forgery in the 1958. Within a year it was returned and now, over 40 years later both versions have shown up for the exhibit.

The rest of this review can be read at The Gilmore Guide to Books: http://gilmoreguidetobooks.com/2016/04/last-painting-sara-de-vos-novel/