The last picture of Sara de Vos

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The Last Painting of Sara de Vos , English original title The Last Painting of Sara de Vos , is a novel by the Australian writer Dominic Smith , published in 2016 . The German translation by Sabine Roth was published by Ullstein Verlag in Berlin in 2017 . In the form of episodes from different times and places, the novel tells the story of a valuable fictional Dutch painting from the 17th century, its forgery and the people associated with it.

Form and content of the plot

The book starts with a dedication addressed to the author's sister. This is followed by a sober, detailed description of Sara de Vos' picture in the familiar style of exhibition or auction catalogs. At the end of the book there is a comment by the author, in which he explains some of the customs and rules of the Guilds of St. Luke at the time , and that there are hardly any works of the painters admitted to these guilds today, except for Judith Leyster , whose pictures however have hundreds Attributed to Frans Hals for years . One of these painters was Sarah van Baalbergen , who was the first woman to join the Guild of St Luke in 1631, even before Judith Leyster. But no picture of her has survived. This Sarah van Baalbergen inspired Dominic Smith to create his fictional character Sara de Vos. This is followed by thanks from the author to the art scholar Frima Fox Hofrichter , who introduced him to the history of Dutch female painters of the 17th century, to a restoration specialist who explained various painting techniques and tricks used by restorers and copyists , and to the art forger Ken Perenyi , who checked parts of the story for credibility. Dominic Smith also thanks in detail several other people for their expert advice and his family, who let him write in peace.

The story consists of two parts. In a kind of parallel narrative technique, different scenes appear in different epochs. The most important locations in the plot are on the one hand New York with its Upper East Side , Brooklyn and Greenwich Village in the 1950s, another setting is the museum scene in Sydney in 2000 and on the other hand the period from 1636 to 1649 in the area around Amsterdam and Heemstede , in which the life of Sara de Vos takes place.

Sara de Vos ( Vos called himself the father of Jan Vermeer ) was admitted to the Guild of St. Luke in Amsterdam in 1631 and her apparently only surviving painting entitled “At the Edge of a Forest” is in the bedroom of the over three hundred years later rich New York patent attorney Marty de Groot, whose family has owned it all these years. The young Australian art history student and restorer Ellie Shipley, who had a great talent for painting, was commissioned one day to make a copy of this picture from professionally made color photos. She is unaware that her near-perfect copy will later be exchanged for the original during a dissolute charity party in Marty de Groot's exclusive penthouse in New York's Central Park . Marty de Groot didn't notice the theft until weeks later. Through a private detective, he finds out about the matter and can identify Ellie as the author of the forgery. He hopes to get to the fence of the stolen original through her and begins an affair with her, which is not just a means to an end, but also turns out to be a love affair. In Marty's dreary marriage to his childless wife, who at times sinks into depression after two miscarriages, the theft of the picture, his research and his desire for eroticism offer an adventurous change. But after a half-hearted erotic night with remorse in a country hotel, Marty suddenly disappears in shame in the middle of the night and leaves Ellie, who has made hope in him, behind alone. Sara de Vos was also left alone by her husband; the novel contains several such seemingly similar details of the plot from the 20th and 17th centuries. Marty suddenly feels that he is doing both his wife and Ellie injustice with this deception. At some point he gets his original picture back and thinks that Ellie's copy was destroyed because the obscure art mediator gave him the ashes of the allegedly burned forgery.

More than 40 years later, Ellie has aged and has a failed marriage behind her, but was able to make a good professional career as a respected curator and lecturer, Marty, now well over 80 years old, appears with his picture of Sara de Vos as an invited lender for a Exhibition on Dutch Golden Age women painters curated by Ellie. She is now afraid that her entire previously superficially successful life will be destroyed at once, because her forgery from her student days, which was not destroyed but continued to be traded on the art market and ended up in a well-known private collection in Leiden, is also being delivered to the exhibition , but on closer inspection it was found to be a fake. She fears that everything will come out and that she will be exposed as an art forger. But Marty only wants to apologize to Ellie for his sudden disappearance from that night of love. It turns out that both of them still have feelings for each other, albeit subliminal. Marty uses his money to ensure that the counterfeit is removed from circulation by buying it anonymously and having Ellie handed it over. Ellie is now traveling to Europe with her picture in order to resume her research on Sara de Vos in the Netherlands, because another picture of the painter that she previously knew nothing about has appeared, a funeral scene.

Backstory

Parallel to this story, the novel tells episodes from the life of Sara de Vos in the 17th century. Sara and her husband Barent were well-known painters in the Amsterdam Guild of St. Luke at the time, but Barent is not very good at business. After the death of their little daughter Kathrijn from the plague, they both fell into deep sadness for a while. Sara, who actually specializes in painting still lifes and flowers, begins the later famous landscape painting "Am Saum eines Waldes" from 1636 after the child's death, which shows a barefoot girl, Sara's daughter, in the snow in a winter landscape with ice-skaters on frozen canals. Barent and Sara go bankrupt because they can no longer pay their debts. One day Barent disappears, leaving Sara alone with her debts. She now has to do catalog drawings for florists to earn a living and to pay off the debt. But after the collapse of the tulip mania , an irrational speculation on tulip bulbs, nothing works for them. But Sara is lucky, because she receives a picture from a wealthy eccentric, whom Barent has promised at some point that he will be invited to paint the same picture for a year at his manor with free board and lodging in order to be able to settle the debts. It should be a picture that in those years already depopulated by the plague, ruinous village should be presented in an idealized form as a reminder of better times. Sara is fine now, because Tomas, an employee of the rich old man who is responsible for the horses, carriages and the rose garden, is friendly to her and has a genuine interest in her painting. Sara also paints the picture of the village, but designs it as a funeral scene for a child, because many children died in the village as a result of the plague, as she learns in conversation from a lonely old woman who is still living there. This picture is also presented in the 2000 exhibition in Sydney. Sara and Tomas get closer on their excursions to explore for motifs in the surrounding landscapes and finally get married. On a cold winter night, the two want to skate on a frozen river. Sara enjoys the freedom and the speed and leaves Tomas far behind. But she breaks into the ice and almost drowns. Tomas can pull her out of the water, but Sara doesn't really recover. In the hospital bed, she begins one last picture, a scene in which a painter, herself in fine clothes, is sitting at the easel and Tomas with a horse with a star on her head, looks at her smiling through a window. But she can no longer complete this picture. Hundreds of years later, Ellie discovers the rolled-up canvas of this last unfinished picture in the attic of an old mansion that an old widow now runs as a shabby guesthouse.

main characters

The main characters in the plot are: Marty de Groot, well dressed, good manners, not a dandy. He is the descendant of Dutch immigrants who inherited wealth, is unhappily married, does nothing in his career as a lawyer for further advancement and wants to have children. His wife Rachel, however, cannot have children, she has had two miscarriages but does not want to adopt any and begins to fall into depression. Therapies for the two don't seem to be helping. Marty's marriage continues to deteriorate and he sees no way out. Only years after his affair with Ellie do Marty and Rachel get back together emotionally, Marty survived Rachel for many years and at the end of the story is well over 80 years old.

Eleanor Shipley, called Ellie, is an Australian art history student in New York and actually very talented as a painter. She lives off restoration jobs and does not get any further with her dissertation on the women in the Dutch Guilds of St. Luke during the Golden Age . As a child, she stole lipsticks and batteries in supermarkets and has never slept with a man. Marty is the first man she has sex with. She is very short-sighted, wears appropriate glasses, is socially not very agile, sometimes dresses inappropriately, appears to many as arrogant and lives entirely for her work in her tiny apartment, in which the kitchen serves as a studio, workshop and laboratory. After completing her studies and completing her dissertation, she made a career as a lecturer and curator in Australia, got married and was divorced again. At the end of the novel, she is over 60, thinking of quitting her job and is somehow dissatisfied with everything. But she never forgets the old story with Marty. After a fateful meeting with him again, which changed her life, she went to the Netherlands and continued research in her specialty: “Life and work of Sara de Vos”, with which she felt more and more connected the more she found out.

Sara de Vos is a still life and flower painter born in 1607 , who was the first woman to join the Amsterdam Guild of St. Luke, which she regards as an honor. She is married to Barent de Vos and has a daughter with him named Kathrijn. But the child dies of the plague and the lives of Sara and Barent take a tragic turn. The end of the so-called tulip mania , an irrational wave of speculation with tulip bulbs, has driven many potential art collectors and buyers to ruin, so that Sara and Barent can no longer sell their works and no longer pay their debts. They go bankrupt and Barent faces jail. So he settles down, leaves a farewell letter and Sara, who now has to cope alone, is left with the debts. Her life then takes a happy turn, she will continue to be able to paint, meets a loving man and probably dies in 1649 as a result of an accident while skating.

expenditure

  • Dominic Smith: The last painting of Sara de Vos . 1st edition. Picador, New York 2017, ISBN 978-1-250-11832-5 .
  • Dominic Smith: The last picture of Sara de Vos novel . 1st edition. Ullstein, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-550-08187-3 (translated from English by Sabine Roth).

Audio book editions

  • Dominic Smith: Last Painting of Sara De Vos. Narrator Edoardo Ballerini. Bolinda Audio, 2017, ISBN 978-1-4894-0281-3 (English).
  • Dominic Smith: The last picture of Sara de Vos . Audio Media Verlag, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-95639-197-2 (6 CDs, abridged edition).

Review of the German edition

The book has been mostly positively received by literary criticism. So who wrote the Mannheimer Morgen in his report, signed by the symbol FD , June 7, 2017, the book that Dominic Smith's novel "... a furious, commonly located between art history and artists Thriller, past and present novel" is, "it in has ".

On June 6, 2017, the reviewer Christina Dittmer reported on the website literaturkritik.de that “Smith's idea of ​​interweaving the perspectives of the painter, the falsifying art scholar and the collector” is convincing that it shows “exciting facets of the artistic process and the Art business both in the recent past and in the 17th century in Holland ”.

The Westfälische Rundschau printed a positive review on May 11, 2017, which stated that “... Dominic Smith succeeds in bringing all the threads of the three time levels together elegantly and surprisingly. So this book is not only an immense pleasure for art lovers. "

The reviewer of the website Histo-Couch.de is not completely satisfied with the book . Karin Speck criticized the fact that in the book “… Sara’s life is described far too briefly to be able to really build a relationship with her. [...] Dominic Smith made the characters believable, but maybe not always told them to the end. "

literature

  • 'The Last Painting of Sara de Vos,' by Dominic Smith . In: The New York Times . 2016 ( nytimes.com ).
  • Dominic Smith, Sarah van Baalbergen: Summary of The last painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith . Idreambooks Inc, 2016, ISBN 978-1-68378-329-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dominic Smith: Who Was Judith Leyster? The Overlooked Women Artists of the Golden Age. In: theparisreview.org. April 4, 2016, accessed June 22, 2017 .
  2. ↑ Smith's The Last Picture. In: Mannheimer Morgen. June 7, 2017.
  3. ↑ Christina Dittmer: The art of falsification website literaturkritik.de.
  4. ^ Art and love. In: Westfälische Rundschau. May 11, 2017.
  5. ↑ Dominic Smith: The last picture of Sara de Vos. Review on Histo-Couch.de.