Paused, too harrowing, and read Heart of Sun Warrior. Got into it after and loved it. Beautiful writing, perfect sentences, haunting story. / You live among the ruins of the past, carry them in your pockets, wishing you'd been decent and loving and talented and brave. Instead you were vain and selfish, capable of love but always giving less than everything you had. ( )

I recently finished Dominic Smith’s latest book, Return to Valetto, and I enjoyed it so much that I decided to read an earlier novel of his which I had been on my to-read pile for quite some time.

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos covers three time periods in three different continents. In New York in 1957, Marty de Groot is robbed of the sole painting attributed to Sara de Vos and left with a “meticulous fake.” Entitled “At the Edge of a Wood,” the painting has been in his family for over 300 years. Marty hires a private detective who discovers that the forger was a graduate student of art history, Ellie Shipley. Marty adopts an alias, Jake Alpert, to entrap Ellie.

In 1637 in Amsterdam, Sara de Vos, the first woman to be admitted into St. Luke’s guild of master painters, paints “At the Edge of a Wood” to help her cope with an unimaginable loss.

In 2000, in Sydney, Australia, Ellie Shipley, now a renowned art historian, awaits the arrival of two paintings entitled “At the Edge of a Wood,” one the original and one the forgery she herself painted almost 50 years earlier. One is coming from the Netherlands and one is being personally delivered by Marty de Groot.

There is sufficient suspense to engage the reader throughout. What will Marty do when he uncovers the identity of the forger? Did Sara de Vos paint only this one painting? Will Ellie’s crime be revealed and her reputation ruined and career destroyed?

Lovers of art will certainly enjoy this book which examines one painting’s impact on people hundreds of years after its creation. Personally I loved the parallels between a painting’s canvas and the canvas of a person’s life. The painting process, and restoration process too, involves the layering of paints just as over a lifetime, we layer on experiences which shape our lives. The canvases of people’s lives show layers of grime, damage, and the effects of time, so the past cannot be totally escaped.

Ellie, for instance, after agreeing to “copy” de Vos, has worked hard to hide that choice but “The forgery didn’t stop after she’d handed off the canvas, it continued into the unfolding of years – the plush academic job, the marriage to an art dealer, the publications and curating of exhibits, none of these spoils would have been offered if anyone knew what she’d done. . . . She never stopped painting the beautiful fake.” Marty admits that he “carries the past around like a bottle of antacids in his pocket. . . . You live among the ruins of the past, carry them in your pockets, wishing you’d been decent and loving and talented and brave.”

I enjoyed the stories of all three characters, especially the examination of their motives. Anger in fact connects all three: Sara is angry at her husband’s choices, Marty is angry at “those who wronged him,” and Ellie “recognized her own recurring anger at being overlooked.” When there are multiple main characters in a novel, I often find one of the narratives less appealing, but that is not the case here. All three emerge as distinct characters, with both flaws and redeeming qualities, and interesting backstories.

On a personal note, I began reading this novel while on a visit to family in the Netherlands so I loved the description of the Dutch “sturdy, unflappable manner and their occasional brusqueness.” We visited the seaside village of Zoutelande in the province of Zeeland so I enjoyed the references to “the dunes of Zeeland” where “German tourists can bunk down with their entire brood” since I climbed those dunes and discovered that German is the second language in that area.

This is a wonderful book which touches on so many human impulses and emotions: anger, ambition, revenge, deceit, regret. Full of suspense and memorable characters, it is a work of both creativity and meticulous research. I highly recommend it.

Note: Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski). ( )

I have had this on my shelf for years, having received it in a Secret Santa one year. It's beautifully written and very engaging, following three different time lines surrounding a painting and its forgery. I'd say the last third got a bit hard to follow or maybe just lost some intrigue for me, but I still really enjoyed this dip into the art world. ( )

2.25 stars

In the 1950s, a young painter, Ellie, is asked to “copy” a painting originally done by Sara de Vos, a Dutch woman painter from the 17th century. Is this a forgery? Or a copy? Is there a difference? She does it. Not sure what happens after this, except that someone hires a private detective who finds Ellie, but then things get passed off to another man to take the young painter to an auction to… try to figure out if she’s the forger? Not too sure… The setting seemed to move between Amsterdam, New York City, and Australia.

I listened to the audio, which did a piss-poor job of keeping my interest (that is, it didn’t – must be able to tell from my feeble summary!), except for briefly with Jake whatever-his-fake-last-name was; anyway, Jake and Ellie ended up in some kind of a relationship, or she thought so, anyway. Near the end of the book, suddenly it was 40 years later, and I missed how that transition happened (though as I read the summary, apparently much of the story was already 40 years later? And I missed it.) The story did shift back in time to 17th century Holland, but I have no idea what was happening in that time frame. I missed ALL of that. Art – also not my thing. The ¼ star is for the brief relationship when I actually paid a little bit of attention.

And wow – I’ve learned so much of what I missed in the book by reading other reviews! I imagine I will learn more in my book club discussion (where I will have very little to contribute!). ( )

This book tells the story of a woman painter of the 1600s, a modern day forgery of her work and the interpersonal relationships between the forger and victim of the forgery, who sets his sights on revenge. It involves 3 storylines from 3 periods in time. The lives of the 2 main female characters contain a number of parallels, even though they are separated by centuries in time. The author has created an interesting plot that provides insight into the different ways loss, revenge, sadness, and regret can impact lives. The book is well-written; the descriptions allowed me to create mental pictures of the paintings as well as the diverse time periods. I recommend it to anyone who enjoys historical fiction, art-based subjects or reflections on human nature. ( )