“She also remembers the way she mishandled the bright yellows… In the late 1950s, very few in the conversation world knew about lead-tin yellow, a pigment favored by Dutch Masters that produces metallic soaps over time.
While the descriptions of places didn’t evoke a strong reaction from me, I found the meticulously researched sections about art restoration and forgeries, fascinating – Subplots in each character’s story, the shifting places and times, and Smith’s smooth style add up to entertaining reading.
Smith brings the story to the present day where, at an art exhibition in Sydney, the pasts of Sara, Marty and Ellie collide.įirstly, this is an engrossing book. Meanwhile, struggling Australian doctorate student, Ellie Shipley, is living in Brooklyn and making ends meet by doing art restoration work…and a forgery. Fast forward to New York in the late fifties, when the painting hangs on millionaire Marty de Groot’s bedroom wall. The painting is by Sara de Vos, a Dutch artist of the Golden Age and the first woman to be accepted as a Master painter into the Guild. Why does the art world make such a good backdrop for fiction? Perhaps because it involves creativity, big personalities, money, glamour, sacrifice and poverty? Or maybe I’m over-thinking it and creating tenuous links between these books…?Ī rare painting, titled ‘At the Edge of the Wood’, provides the link between three separate places, times and characters in this tightly told cat-and-mouse story. I’ve been wondering if ‘art-thriller’ is a genre… I’m thinking books such as What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt, Tuesday Nights in 1980 by Molly Prentiss, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt and my latest read, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith.
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