Throw in the possibility of an affair, a young woman procrastinating at her dissertation on a Remington, and the tragedy of lost children, and you have all the key ingredients for high-level intrigue. It's a checklist of literary whoopee: the art world, jazz clubs, a Mad Men-style Manhattan couple of the 1950s, a woman painter in the 1630s, behind the scenes of the Art Gallery of NSW, a long-kept secret from someone's youth. Flash-forward, it's Ellie in her sixties in Sydney curating an exhibition, awaiting both the original and her own forgery. We flashback to the circumstances under which the painting originated and see Sara de Vos in 1631, the only woman admitted as master painter to the Guild of St Luke's in Holland. 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. The book centres on the influence of a painting on three people across centuries: mid-17th century Amsterdam, the time of the Dutch masters New York in the 1950s and Sydney at the turn of this century. The plot is so rich that the description of it could sound too dense, but Smith weaves his tale with a light touch. The Last Painting of Sara de Vos is the fourth novel by Dominic Smith, an Australian living in Texas. The Last Picture of Sara de Vos, by Dominic Smith.
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