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Book Cover
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Author Smith, Dominic, 1971- author

Title The last painting of Sara de Vos / Dominic Smith
Published Crows Nest, N.S.W. : Allen & Unwin, 2016
Crows Nest, NSW : Allen & Unwin, 2016
©2016

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Description 374 pages ; 24 cm
regular print
Summary 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 this extraordinary novel, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, Australian writer Dominic Smith brilliantly 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 Australian art historian who painted a forgery of it in her youth. In 1631, Sara de Vos is admitted to the Guild of St. Luke in Holland as a master painter, the first woman to be so honoured. 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 Manhattan 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 exhibition of female Dutch painters, and both versions threaten to arrive. As the three threads intersect with increasing and exquisite suspense, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos mesmerises while it grapples with the demands of the artistic life, showing how the deceits of the past can forge the present. --Back cover
Analysis Australian
Subject Baalbergen, Sarah van, 1607- approximately 1638 -- Fiction.
Baalbergen, Sarah van, 1607- approximately 1638.
Art historians -- Fiction.
Art -- Forgeries -- Fiction.
Art historians.
Australian fiction.
Art -- Forgeries.
Novel -- English -- United States -- 21st century -- Texts
Painting, Dutch -- 17th century -- Fiction.
Painting, Dutch -- 17th century.
Women artists -- Netherlands -- Fiction.
Women artists -- Netherlands.
Genre/Form Historical fiction.
Novels.
ISBN 9781743439951