the last painting of sara de vos summary

Will it ever go away? The anguish.' What transpires here out is a masterpiece from the embers of her soul. 'Sara brings her gaze back from the low fire beneath the cauldron. But then a tragedy strikes in Sara's life that transforms the feel of the brush as it touches canvas.

Females were subjected to disregard in the field of art and were relegated to painting flowers.

Although her husband is an artist as well, we come to realize what actually defines the term 'master'. Sara de Vos is a master painter living with her husband near Amsterdam in the 17th century. And those regrets are the framework upon which this canvas is spread. The voice of this well-crafted story shifts from the experiential situations of each of his main characters. Each time period is layered expertly like parchment paper that settles oh so lightly allowing the reader to experience what came before and what is yet to come. And the indescribable ache now takes up a permanent residence.ĭominic Smith presents his remarkable novel in time spans that drift from 1631 to 1957 to 2000. Other times they are heavy-ladden with pressure forcefully leaning on the heart. Sometimes they are as light as the wings of a butterfly causing but a brief pause. Regrets come into our lives from our earliest moments until the very last. 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. Because now, half a century later, she's curating an exhibit of female Dutch painters, and both versions threaten to arrive. 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.

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. Luke's in Holland, the first woman to be so recognized. In 1631, Sara de Vos is admitted as a master painter to the Guild of St. 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 his earlier, award-winning novels, Dominic Smith demonstrated a gift for coaxing the past to life. 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.

The last painting of sara de vos summary