'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.' (Publication summary)
'The novel is peopled by artists, art dealers, critics, patrons of art, forgers, and curators. For this novel, there were three essential "informants": Stephen Gritt, the head of restoration at the National Gallery of Canada; Frima Fox Hofrichter, an art historian who specializes in Judith Leyster and women painters of the seventeenth century; and Ken Perenyi, a master forger who wrote a fascinating memoir called Caveat Emptor. [...]I think the opposite-that Australians understand they are playing on the world stage, and often at the top tier, across all the artistic fields. [...]the moral forgery at the center of the book is much more interesting to me dramatically, as a fiction writer-and it's also the bigger moral failure, in my view.' (Publication abstract)
'The novel is peopled by artists, art dealers, critics, patrons of art, forgers, and curators. For this novel, there were three essential "informants": Stephen Gritt, the head of restoration at the National Gallery of Canada; Frima Fox Hofrichter, an art historian who specializes in Judith Leyster and women painters of the seventeenth century; and Ken Perenyi, a master forger who wrote a fascinating memoir called Caveat Emptor. [...]I think the opposite-that Australians understand they are playing on the world stage, and often at the top tier, across all the artistic fields. [...]the moral forgery at the center of the book is much more interesting to me dramatically, as a fiction writer-and it's also the bigger moral failure, in my view.' (Publication abstract)
The Book Club [May 2016]
Sydney
:
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
,
2016
15259467
2016
film/TV
Host Jennifer Byrne joins regular panelists Marieke Hardy and Jason Steger, and guests Jeanette Winterson and Virginia Gay to discuss and review the classic book Wuthering Heights and Australian novel, The Last Painting of Sara De Vos by Dominic Smith.
