the last painting of sara de vos summary

Perhaps it was a mistake to hang it over the bed, because his wife Rachel is suffering from depression brought on by their childless marriage. Although a pragmatic New York lawyer and not a man given to fancies, sometimes Marty thinks the painting is cursed because the ancestors who owned the painting before him all died comparatively young. It’s a haunting painting, which has been in Marty de Groot‘s family for generations. The novel begins in 1957 with the cunning theft of a Dutch landscape, a painting called ‘ At the Edge of a Wood’. The plot of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos covers three time periods. (If the name Dominic Smith seems familiar, it’s perhaps because his 2010 novel Bright and Distant Shores, was short-listed for the 2011 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, the 2012 Adelaide Festival Awards, and for the the 2011 Age Book of the Year, and then I chased up and reviewed his debut novel The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerrefrom 2006). And this novel, by Aussie expat Dominic Smith, has a special resonance for me because the plot revolves around Dutch art of the 17th century, bringing back memories of the artworks we saw in the Netherlands just last year. I love novels about art, everything from Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, to Michael Frayn’s mischievous Headlong, historical fiction by Tracy Chevalier and Susan Vreeland, and others in this category reviewed on this blog. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.I was always going to love this book. With Instaread, you can get the key takeaways, summary and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. Inside this Instaread Summary of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos:Īnalysis of the Themes and Author's Style

PLEASE NOTE: This is summary and analysis of the book and NOT the original book. Little does Marty know that their meeting will end up having a profound effect on both of their lives.ĭuring a charity event at his and his wife Rachel's penthouse on the Upper East Side, thieves steal into Marty's bedroom and take his de Vos, a 1636 painting titled At the Edge of a Wood.

Hoping to get his revenge, Marty goes after the suspected forger, whom he later learns is a pretty, 20-something graduate student named Ellie Shipley. In the year 1957, wealthy New Yorker Marty de Groot realizes that his beloved painting, the only known surviving oil-on-canvas by seventeenth-century Dutch artist Sara de Vos, has gone missing. The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith is a novel that describes the way two lives become intertwined through a mutual obsession with a seventeenth-century Dutch artist. Summary of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith | Includes Analysis

The last painting of sara de vos summary