With the artistry of words, Dominic Smith paints the story of
3 lives: the life of Sara deVos a woman who daringly painted a landscape during
the Dutch Golden Age; the life of Marty De Groot a Manhattan attorney born into
privilege who tracks down the forger of the Sara de Vos he inherited; and the
life of Ellie Shipley an art historian who as a young graduate student painted
the forgery. Smith stretches his canvas from the 1600s across time to the 1950s
and out to the edge of 2000.
The stories of Sara, Marty and Ellie create the underlayer
of Smith’s work. Sara, born in Amsterdam in the early 1600s, was the daughter
of a landscape painter and trained as a still life artist. Women were only
permitted to paint still life paintings at that time. She married a landscape painter,
Barent, and together they made a meagre living by selling their work. Their daughter,
Katrijn, who filled their lives with the beauty of youth and innocence, contracted
the plague and died just before her 9th birthday. Katrijn’s death
was devastating for Sara and the grief never left her. It was that grief and
her intimate brush with death that compelled Sara to paint her first landscape.
The painting, At the Edge of a Wood,
was a physical depiction of the moment a young woman passes from life to death
and views the living world from a distance. Smith’s description of the painting
is hauntingly sensual creating in the reader a deep yearning to see it with his
own eyes.
He writes: “A winter scene at twilight. The girl stands in
the foreground against a silver birch, a pale hand pressed to its bark, staring
out at the skaters on the frozen river. There are half a dozen of them, bundled
against the cold, flecks of brown and yellow cloth floating above the ice. A
brindled dog trots beside a boy as he arcs into a wide turn. One mitten in the
air, he’s beckoning to the girl, to us. Up along the riverbank, a village is
drowsy with smoke and firelight, flush against the bell of the pewter sky. A
single cataract of daylight at the horizon, a meadow dazzled beneath a rent in
the clouds, then the revelation of her bare feet in the snow.”
It is this painting that hangs above the bed of Martin and
Rachel de Groot. Martin de Groot was born into wealth and is heir to art work
that has been in his family for 3 centuries. His life and its problems in the 1950s
have the weight of a feather compared to those of Sara de Vos in 1637. He
worries about his impending partnership with his law firm. He repeatedly
assesses the happiness of his marriage. However, Marty is snatched out of his ruminations
when he discovers At the Edge of the Wood
has been stolen from his apartment and replaced with a forgery. He becomes
obsessed with finding the perpetrator.
The perpetrator is Ellie Shipley, a PhD student at Columbia
studying the women painters of the Dutch Golden Age. Ellie is a young woman
fascinated by the techniques and chemistry of the old masters. She is “in love”
with the paintings of Vermeer and Rembrandt, Halls and Van
Goyen and also with At
the Edge of the Wood. Ellie made money on the side by restoring old
paintings and when asked to create a copy of At the Edge of the Wood she couldn’t resist the creative
opportunity. The forgery was Ellie’s greatest
artistic achievement and its image lived with her every day. But the truth of
it hauntingly tiptoed behind her because if found out her career would be
ruined.
Marty de Groot finds Ellie and deceitfully hires her as an
art consultant. Smith artfully uses the relationship that develops between the
two to illuminate each character’s desires, frailties, passions, dreams and
regrets. Each character is revealed with such stark honesty that the heart of
the reader cannot help but recognize them as kindred human spirits. But it is
the gentle thread of suspense that leads us to continually turn the page. Will
Ellie be discovered and what will be the consequences? What happened to the
forgery and the original? How will Marty de Groot mete out his revenge?
The story line is woven with details true to the historical
periods. Smith clearly has conducted meticulous research which educates the
reader. Especially detailed are his explanations of painting materials and restoration
techniques. Here he describes Ellie preparing to paint:
A woman standing in a smock at
dawn, grinding pigments and boiling up animal glue on the stovetop. It’s the
1630’s as far as Ellie Shipley is concerned and canvas can only be bought at the
width of a Dutch loom---a little over fifty-four inches. She reads by
candle-light, like a method actor, and makes obscure errands into the supply
chain that is the stock and trade for period conservators and forgers alike.
Cold-pressed linseed oil that does not cloud, oil of spike and lavender, raw
sienna, lead white that fumes for a month in a cloud of vinegar. She paints in
her kitchenette, where the northern light washes through her grimy window and
the view gives onto the streaming traffic of the Gowanus Expressway. She sees
commuters on the city-bound buses, metal ribbons dotted with faces. She wonders
sometimes whether those glazed passengers see her makeshift studio as an
after-image. In their mind’s eye they see her bent over the stovetop and think
she’s stirring porridge instead of melting animal hide.
The alluring plot and ample character development lay the
foundation for this novel but the images of color, texture and scent are what
bring light to the work just like the lead tin yellow brings light to the
scarves of the skaters. Smith is a master at creating images that touch all the
senses and bring his readers to a places beyond words. Here he takes us for a
ride in Marty’s Citroen.
“At the curb, his night-blue
Citroen looks almost sardonic in the morning light “___its raked hood and sleek
headlights give it the dreadnought grace of a shark….” He puts her suitcase in
the trunk and they climb in. When he starts the engine, the car shudders and
rises a few inches with a pneumatic sigh. She looks over at him and he grins.
He says, “they call that the kneel.” A moment later, he puts on a pair of
driving gloves and gives the horn a light jab---it sounds French and
adenoidal—and they pull down the street…From inside the car, she can’t help
feeling like an aristocrat touring the proletariat. He’s wearing a pair of
driving moccasins and they’re cut form the same leather as his kidskin driving
gloves and his watchband---she’s always noticing his clothes. That kind of
accessorizing on a different man might seem foppish, but on Jake it seems
natural and masculine. Sometimes his clothes and mannerisms make her feel
clumsy and flat footed, but most of the time she likes to watch him do things
with his hands---the slow and precise gestures, the easy way of folding his
arms across his chest when he’s listening to her go on about paintings. She
looks out the window and sees a gaunt man leaning in the doorway, his breath
smoking as the early light braces the length of the street.”
Below the author sets the scene as Sara and Tomas (a man she
meets later in the book) go out for an evening skate on the ice:
“They come down to the frozen
riverbank, the ice thick and almost translucent where the snow has blown clear.
There are patches of such clarity that she can see warped reflections of the
night sky. The reeds are empty husks, gone the color of driftwood: they rattle
and clack in the light wind. The couple stands together, his arm around her
shoulder. She looks down into a window of clarified ice and thinks of the
sluggish fish moping at the bottom, drifting in the slurries that run cold
along the mud, of the way she and Tomas might appear to them as a two-headed
beast through the frozen lens of the river. Tomas throws a big rock out in to
the center to test the hardness of the ice. It makes a satisfying thunk.”
And finally a simple introduction to Tomas:
“He leads the way across the marble
floor and they pass behind the wide staircase to a narrow passageway she
assumes is designated for the servants. Tomas is tall and meticulous in his
movements, smells of leather and horses. His hands against the lantern are pale
and thin: they seem at odds with his tending of the stable and the grounds.”
The Last Painting of Sara de Vos is a novel that takes your
hand and leads you down a curious path to an unknown end. The path is rich with
color, texture and scent. You stop and luxuriate in the luminosity of the
paintings of the Dutch Golden Age. You walk beside people you know well and not
so well. They pass you and you pass them as together and with the author we
bathe in the light of being human.
