Reviews of the Last Painting of Sara De Vos
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The Last Painting of Sara de Vos review: Dominic Smith's brilliant fine art novel
By Louise Swinn
FICTION
The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
Dominic Smith weaves his tale with a light affect in The Final Painting of Sara de Vos. Credit:Louise Kennerley
DOMINIC SMITH
ALLEN & UNWIN, $32.99
The Last Picture of Sara de Vos, by Dominic Smith.
The Last Painting of Sara de Vos is the fourth novel by Dominic Smith, an Australian living in Texas. The plot is then rich that the description of it could sound also dumbo, but Smith weaves his tale with a lite impact. The book centres on the influence of a painting on three people beyond centuries: mid-17th century Amsterdam, the time of the Dutch masters; New York in the 1950s; and Sydney at the turn of this century.
When an heirloom painting is stolen off Marty de Groot's Manhattan walls in 1957, Ellie Shipley, a young Australian living in NYC, is employed by a shady art dealer to paint a fake. We flashback to the circumstances nether which the painting originated and see Sara de Vos in 1631, the just woman admitted as primary painter to the Order of St Luke's in Holland. Wink-forward, it'southward Ellie in her sixties in Sydney curating an exhibition, pending both the original and her own forgery.
It's a checklist of literary whoopee: the art world, jazz clubs, a Mad Men-fashion Manhattan couple of the 1950s, a woman painter in the 1630s, backside the scenes of the Art Gallery of NSW, a long-kept clandestine from someone's youth. Throw in the possibility of an matter, a immature woman procrastinating at her dissertation on a Remington, and the tragedy of lost children, and y'all have all the key ingredients for loftier-level intrigue.
Parallel questions of identity ascend. What success might Sara have seen if her life hadn't been constricted by poverty and by the era, when women were not artists? Would the forgery accept occurred if Ellie hadn't been struggling in New York, having fled Commonwealth of australia'southward chauvinistic art world?
But it is Marty, taking things into his own hands when the police turn up nada, who assumes a new identity in society to discover the original. As Jake Alpert, a facsimile of himself but recently widowed, he acts out an alternating life, allowing us to consider the importance of fate in deciding the people nosotros get.
Marty's ancestors have had bad luck since the painting came into the family 300 years earlier, ago, and Marty'southward luck has improved in the half-dozen months since the original went missing. Through him we are given the opportunity to contemplate the value of a life well lived. "You alive among the ruins of the past, deport them in your pockets, wishing you lot'd been decent and loving and talented and brave. Instead yous were vain and selfish, capable of dearest just always giving less than everything you had. Y'all held back." There are shades of Marilynne Robinson in Smith'south lucid prose.
He is a great writer, particularly good at the atmospheric details and the book is reminiscent of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch in its familiarity with the art earth. Merely Smith gets downward and muddy with the tools of the trade, and the descriptions of Ellie's forging piece of work in her grimy Brooklyn apartment are dazzling. Somehow the gap of 300 years is closed and she could be in The netherlands, working aslope Sara.
History'southward gaps can be filled by artists who are prepared to immerse themselves – information technology's more than just the rich biographical details that enquiry uncovers but the emotional lives that can be deciphered only through empathic reading of fourth dimension, place and humanity. If these are the gaps it is the job of novelists to fill, happily, similar Frank Moorhouse in his Edith Campbell Drupe trilogy, Dominic Smith has done merely that. Beg, borrow or – perchance most fittingly – steal.
Louise Swinn is a writer and publisher.
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Source: https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/the-last-painting-of-sara-de-vos-review-dominic-smiths-brilliant-art-novel-20160526-gp4sq3.html
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