When a struggling art history grad student, Ellie Shipley, agrees to forge the painting for a dubious art dealer, she finds herself entangled with its owner in ways no one could predict. The lawyer's marriage is prominent but comfortless, too. It is a beautiful but comfortless landscape. New York City, 1957: The only known surviving work of Sara de Vos, At the Edge of a Wood, hangs in the bedroom of a wealthy Manhattan lawyer, Marty de Groot, a descendant of the original owner. Defying the expectations of her time, she decides to paint it.

Though women do not paint landscapes (they are generally restricted to indoor subjects), a wintry outdoor scene haunts Sara: She cannot shake the image of a young girl from a nearby village, standing alone beside a silver birch at dusk, staring out at a group of skaters on the frozen river below. Vividly detailed, acutely sensitive to stratifications of gender and class, it's fiction that keeps you up at night - first because you're barreling through the book, then because you've slowed your pace to a crawl, savoring the suspense.' - Boston GlobeĪ New York Times Book Review Editor's ChoiceĪ RARE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTING LINKS THREE LIVES, ON THREE CONTINENTS, OVER THREE CENTURIES IN THE LAST PAINTING OF SARA DE VOS, AN EXHILARATING NEW NOVEL FROM DOMINIC SMITH.Īmsterdam, 1631: Sara de Vos becomes the first woman to be admitted as a master painter to the city's Guild of St. 'Written in prose so clear that we absorb its images as if by mind meld, 'The Last Painting' is gorgeous storytelling: wry, playful, and utterly alive, with an almost tactile awareness of the emotional contours of the human heart.

The last painting of sara de vos