The Last Painting of Sara De Vox (Dominic Smith)

 

I read this book over a short period of time (a couple days) and that was probably was good because I am not sure I would have stuck with it if I was reading it at a more leisurely pace. There is a lot of jumping between time for each character and I found that confusing. Each chapter switches from one character to another and to another time. I enjoyed learning about the art and history of artists and their "union" rules. I read it for book club and this book was a perfect example of why I love being in a book club. I enjoyed the book enough and it is one I would not have read if it wasn't for book club. It got 'meh' ratings from everyone at book club.

Goodreads says:

This is what we long for: the profound pleasure of being swept into vivid new worlds, worlds peopled by characters so intriguing and real that we can't shake them, even long after the reading's done. In his earlier, award-winning novels, Dominic Smith demonstrated a gift for coaxing the past to life. Now, in The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, he deftly bridges the historical and the contemporary, tracking a collision course between a rare landscape by a female Dutch painter of the golden age, an inheritor of the work in 1950s Manhattan, and a celebrated art historian who painted a forgery of it in her youth.

In 1631, Sara de Vos is admitted as a master painter to the Guild of St. Luke's in Holland, the first woman to be so recognized. Three hundred years later, only one work attributed to de Vos is known to remain--a haunting winter scene, At the Edge of a Wood, which hangs over the bed of a wealthy descendant of the original owner. An Australian grad student, Ellie Shipley, struggling to stay afloat in New York, agrees to paint a forgery of the landscape, a decision that will haunt her. Because now, half a century later, she's curating an exhibit of female Dutch painters, and both versions threaten to arrive. As the three threads intersect, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos mesmerizes while it grapples with the demands of the artistic life, showing how the deceits of the past can forge the present.