the Last Painting of Sara Devos Book Reviews
Review: 'The Last Painting of Sara de Vos,' a riveting tale of art theft
(Sarah Crichton Books)
Ian Shapira
Whenever I gravitate to a painting in a museum, I always read the accompanying placard. And yet, so often these piffling labels tend to run simply a few lines long: championship of work; name of artist; date of nascency, decease. No rich description of what yous run into.
Curators around the earth would do well to hire Dominic Smith to craft those gallery signs (though I doubtable Smith may non demand the side gig). Splashed across the entire outset page of his riveting book, "The Last Painting of Sara de Vos," is the plaque for the fictional painting that dominates his narrative:
At the Edge of a Forest (1636)
Oil on canvas
30'' x 24"
Sara de Vos
Dutch, 1607-16??
A winter scene at twilight. The girl stands in the foreground against a silverish birch, a pale hand pressed to its bark, staring out at the skaters on the frozen river. . . . Her eyes are fixed on some afar point — but is it dread or the strange halo of winter twilight that pins her in place? She seems unable, or unwilling, to reach the frozen riverbank.
Once Smith has crystallized that painting in our minds, his bodily story begins on the next page. It's 1957, and 40-year-one-time patent attorney Marty de Groot and his wife are hosting a $500-a-plate clemency outcome at their Upper East Side triplex. Above the couple's marital bed hangs "At the Edge of a Wood," kickoff purchased by one of his Dutch ancestors iii centuries earlier. The piece is like an albatross: No de Groot who has ever endemic information technology has lived past the age of 60.
[You may also savour 'The Goldfinch,' by Donna Tartt]
Still, de Groot values his family heirloom. In Smith's invented world, "At the Edge of a Woods" is supposedly the only surviving painting of de Vos, a painter with status: She's the kickoff woman inducted as a master into the Guild of St. Luke in Holland, a in one case-powerful governing body that determined how much painters got paid and included Rembrandt and Vermeer, according to the writer'due south annotation at the starting time of the volume.
Even though de Groot is one of those New York patricians living off inherited wealth in a prewar penthouse with views of Cardinal Park, we still root for him. He'south the victim of a crime. At the fourth dimension of his charity party, he has no clue that his prized painting had actually been stolen at some betoken earlier and replaced with a "forgery hanging in plain sight."
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The author Dominic Smith (Stacy Sodolak)
It'southward only 6 months afterward the party that de Groot happens to discover something'due south off: The painting has a new frame. And the sheet is dirtier than normal. He hires a individual investigator, and the narrative is off and running. Who stole "At the Edge of a Forest" and replaced it with a fake? The naive lawyer is and then ashamed by the theft that he tells colleagues that the perpetrators must have been men disguised equally caterers at his charity result.
The genius of Smith's book is not only the caper plot only also the interweaving of iii alternate timelines and locations to tell a wider, suspenseful story of one painting's rippling impact on three people over multiple centuries and locations.
Each chapter switches upwards the time and geography: In one chapter, you're in 1950s New York, watching de Groot rail down the forger; the next, yous're in mid-17th century Holland, where we meet de Vos and sympathize her tragic life and how she came to pigment "At the Border of a Wood"; and so in other chapters, you zoom forward to 2000, when Marty and the forger run into in Australia.
Smith clearly immersed himself in the world of Dutch masters and the subculture of forgers, too. His descriptions are beautifully precise and reveal the vast research required to write so originally in the well-trodden genre of art mystery.
He also captures the fascinating mind-gear up of the forger with such thoughtfulness: "So much of the forger's dominion is theater and subtext," he writes, "a series of enticements. An obscure provenance, suggested by visual cues, is irresistible to a sure kind of buyer — it becomes a story of their own discernment, of plucking a second cocky from the folds of history."
Merely the novel's most gripping parts exist in 17th-century Kingdom of the netherlands and the telling of de Vos'due south life. Who was the lilliputian girl watching the frozen river in "At the Edge of a Wood"? And was this piece truly "the final painting" of Sara de Vos?
Smith's volume absorbs you from the get-go. Merely its existent fuel comes from the anguish of his titular character and, three centuries afterward, the burdens felt by the inheritor and forger of her most famous piece of work.
Ian Shapira is a Washington Post author.
The Concluding Painting of Sara de Vos
Past Dominic Smith
Sarah Crichton. 290 pp. $26
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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/review-the-last-painting-of-sara-de-vos-a-riveting-tale-of-art-theft/2016/04/05/465f55dc-f758-11e5-a3ce-f06b5ba21f33_story.html
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