When Sara loses her seven-year-old daughter to an illness, she crafts At the Edge of a Wood, the painting that creates the conflict at the heart of the novel. Sara de Vos is a seventeenth-century Dutch painter and one of very few women admitted to the painters’ Guild of St. THE LAST PAINTING OF SARA DE VOS considers what happens on both sides of a theft, specifically how a person might gain from a loss and what a person who takes from others stands to lose. What I found was a beautiful story about how different people react to loss, betrayal, and grief. In academic writing, it can get a little tedious, but Smith’s prose is lyrical and unpretentious and it pulled me in right away. I work at an art research library and I instantly recognized the language: a mixture of sensitivity to nuance, precise technical understanding, and a sense of profound awe. When I first read THE LAST PAINTING OF SARA DE VOS, I couldn’t believe that author Dominic Smith wasn’t an art historian because he definitely understands how art historians think.
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