Art Appreciation: The Last Painting of Sara de Vos | 2016

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"The paintings on your walls, the Dutch rivers and kitchens, the Flemish peasant frolics, they give off fumes and dull with age, but connect you to a bloodline of want, to shipbuilders and bankers who stared up at them as their own lives tapered off. Like trees, they have breathed in the air around them and now they exhale some of their previous owners' atoms and molecules. They could last for a thousand years, these paintings, and that buoys you as you drift off, a layer just above sleep. Skimming the pond, Rachel used to call it, or was that something you once said to her? You should turn everything off in the room, but you don't. You let the lamps burn all night."
- The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

You guys, this book is #gorgeous.

The Sum of It:

Though people are essential to Dominic Smith's atmospheric story, and represent much of the finely wrought detail, the book's main character is really a melancholy painting by a fictional female Dutch master, Sara de Vos, called "At the Edge of a Wood." We first truly meet the painting in 1950s Manhattan, where it hangs above the bed of wealthy and debonair Marty de Groot, who inherited a vast collection of valuable art and a very Don-Draper sounding penthouse from his father. The painting, which readers can see in their mind's eyes as clearly as if the book contained illustrations thanks to Smith's magical powers of description, depicts a winter scene with a forlorn, barefoot girl at the edge of a wood gazing at children ice skating on a frozen river. Though the painting is sad, its one of Marty's favorites, so when something seems off about the nails in the frame, he realizes that somehow his priceless original has been replaced with a forgery. 

We gradually learn more about the painting in a timeline centuries earlier, where the artist, Sara de Vos, and her hometown in Holland are depicted just as vividly as more contemporary scenes. Though she typically paints only still lifes, Sara is brought to this visual depiction of her own grief following a family tragedy. 

The painting and its meticulous copy that even had Marty fooled for a while in the 1950s come together with Marty and the art forger, in the year 2000 in Australia, when both paintings make their way to a gallery for a highly publicized show. 

Along the way, luminous depictions of 1950s New York dinner parties and jazz clubs, fabulous Manhattan homes and humble artist's apartments in Brooklyn, the bleak but beautiful landscapes and ruined villages of the Netherlands of long ago, and well-heeled art galleries and seaside scenery of modern-day Australia all wrap you in the world of the story. Aside from the painting, the book's other beautifully drawn main characters: art collector Marty, art historian Ellie, and enigmatic painter Sara bring to light the very human themes of self-reflection, loss, heartache, and what it means to grow old. 

The YOA Treatment:

Once again we find a tale that toes the line between genre fiction and literary fiction, a line we constantly bump up against (and wonder if we could just throw out?) in our travels here on the blog. This book certainly begins as a #whodunnit; a valuable painting is missing from a very secure penthouse apartment and replaced by a meticulous but still fake copy -- who managed to steal it and how? Was the forger the same person who crept in and stole away with it? This central mystery is also supplemented by the mystery of the painting itself. So little is known of the artist, Sara de Vos, or why she seems to have only one work, despite being the first female member of the artist's Guild of St. Luke. We have the added suspense of the forgery and original coming together under the watchful eyes of both the forger and original owner; how will that situation conclude? Who knows how much? It'll keep you turning the pages, that's for sure.

On the other hand, this book is so beautifully written that those who feel crime fiction is not really capable of being true art might protest to us placing it so close to the genre fiction line (we aren't those people, obvi). Each time period painted in this tale is so painstakingly drawn you might as well be watching a movie (and just to be clear, we'd watch a movie of this one fo sho). As someone who secretly wishes she could go back in time and study art history and spend days studying brushstrokes in a museum, the windows into the world of painters and art collectors is a genuine treat you want to wrap yourself in like a beautiful cashmere blanket. The language (ever important to us, especially Emily) is so lovely and glittering it could high five Annie Dillard. Each character struggles with their own identity, and how their actions reflect who they are (or want to be) as each timeline is drawn closer and closer together. Basically, GO READ IT and THANK US LATER #yourewelcome. 

- E.