Our October selection is The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith, an Amazon Best Book of April 2016 and a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. Per Kirkus Reviews, “Smith’s latest novel is a rich and detailed story that connects a 17th-century Dutch painting to its 20th-century American owner and the lonely but fervent art student who makes the life-changing decision to forge it.”
Discussion begins October 1st. Please join us!
This seems like a great book to read and discuss. Looking forward to it!
This looks like a great selection. I’ve ordered my copy and will be here in October!
See you in October – as opposed to September, as the song goes!
Finished the book way too early! Looking forward to the discussion!
Just a tip – Don’t read the NY Times review before reading the book! Tons of spoilers. (I luckily read the review only after reading the book, so it wasn’t spoiled for me but I thought I’d warn others.)
I picked up a copy of the book from the library yesterday. I’m relieved to find it’s less than 300 pages. September looks to be a busy month for me, but I can do this. See you guys Oct. 1.
By the way, the book looks good. I’ll have a hard time waiting a few days to start it but have no choice in the matter.
While cleaning up the disastrously messy bedroom left by my college-bound daughter, I found an unused B&N gift card. Finders Keepers! Used it to buy The Last Painting of Sara de Vos. Why waste good money on textbooks, right? See you all on October 1st!
Oddly, the book has been sitting in a display of new books in our little local library for some weeks now, with nobody apparently checking it out. Planning to pick it up in the next few days when I go in to return some DVDs.
Just finished reading The Last Painting of Sara de Vos. It took me about ten days, but the book is not all that long and could be read faster. I found it to be enjoyable and an excellent book club selection.
It’s October 1st! (And frankly, I can hardly believe it. Wasn’t it just August?) Welcome to our discussion of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith.
I thought this book was excellent–carefully constructed and beautifully written. With its interweaving of history and present day, its focus on forgery and the power of art, and a little mystery to unravel, it struck me that The Last Painting of Sara de Vos is everything The Bookman’s Tale would have liked to be, if only it had been in the hands of a better author. (Sorry Charlie Lovett, but it’s true.) The two books even share a discussion question, “Is high-quality forgery a form of art?” (a resounding “yes!”, but more on that later).
The questions below are from Reading Group Guides and they run the gamut in quality. I thought #5 was particularly nonsensical. Feel free to add your own.
I really enjoyed this book. I found it to be a suspenseful page-turner. I thought the plot was very cleverly constructed and I enjoyed the back-and-forth between historical periods. But I read it right after we selected it, and it has NOT stuck with me. I’m off to do some fast skimming to refresh my memory so I can participate here.
I liked the book and felt that it was one of our better choices, but I certainly didn’t think it was perfect. For one thing, a person who was not an artist herself could never have painted the convincing fake that Ellie supposedly produced. That was extremely far-fetched.
I did very much enjoy getting to know a little more about an interesting period in art history and its women artists. I had never known that these women existed!
In my opinion, the sections of the book that took place long ago in the Netherlands and in present-day Australia were the best, because I didn’t know much about either environment. When I was reading the sections that took place in the United States in the 1950s, I kept stumbling upon anachronisms and errors that discomfited me…
As a part-time artist myself, I was not bothered by Ellie being able to produce the fake. I thought there was enough there to convince me she had the artistic experience to pull it off. In fact I think the process of reproducing the painting brought out the artist in her and made her realize that restoring paintings was not her calling.
I too was not 100% convinced by the 1950s section, though nothing specific. I kept wondering if the food they were eating was correct and comparing what they did with what I remember of my parents in the early 60s. (As diplomats they lived a life of endless cocktail parties.) I was highly amused that the “Rent a Beat” was a real thing. And while I do think Question 5 is silly, I think they were another way of reminding us how isolated Upper East side life could be from that of regular New Yorkers.
A couple images to accompany “Rent a Beat”:
There was no carry-out pizza in the 1950s – there was essentially no carry-out at all, except for maybe a sandwich wrapped up for you at a drugstore lunch counter or something. Pizza was not that popular yet, and if you did eat it, it would be at a sit-down Italian restaurant.
In the 50s, a woman would never have worn slacks to her office, as Ellie’s department head at Columbia did in the book. That would have been almost as outlandish as wearing a bikini or a suit of armor.
Rachel had brochures about luxury river cruises in Europe. Those did not exist in the 1950s.
The ceiling decorations in Grand Central Station could not have been viewed at that time because they had not been cleaned and restored yet.
The author mentioned a fishing village in NJ on the Hudson across from NYC. That sounds wrong to me, and there were other geographical descriptions of the NY/NJ area that also seemed “off.”
NJTM: You made me want to fact-check pizza delivery.
The carry-out trend was well established by the mid-1950s. https://restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com/tag/1950s/
By 1944, restaurants in New York City offered pizza that could be “ordered to take home,” which were “packed, piping hot, in special boxes for that purpose.” http://time.com/4291197/take-out-delivery-food-history/
Okay thanks, ignatius. I lived in Texas back then, not New York. Texas may have been behind the times!
The Last Painting of Sara de Vos reminds me of The Bookman’s Tale also and I feel much as Mary does re the comparison of the two books.
So, why are there no questions that even mention the artists and paintings referenced throughout the book? For me, one of my takeaways from reading this selection will be just that. Take Judith Leyster, for example (and note the name of the man who “rediscovered” her):
And yes I looked up each of the artists and paintings mentioned :-B
Oh, I agree – but question 5 refers to the “plight of Sara,” which didn’t make sense to me in the context of the Rent-a-Beats. So now I’m thinking it was a typo and should have said “plight of Ellie.”
But wasn’t that exactly the point?
I thought she was making a statement – woman in a man’s world and all that. I pictured her something like the middle model, but with uglier shoes 
: https://www.google.com/search?q=beryl+markham&biw=1497&bih=862&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=0ahUKEwighbbyrbrPAhUCzIMKHdp-C5EQ_AUIBigB#tbm=isch&q=women+fashion+slacks+1950&imgrc=fKIJDe5CsBkq9M%3A
I even looked up At the Edge of a Wood, hoping that some imaginative person had posted their version of it. No luck. But I found this site by Dominic Smith himself and thought it was great: http://www.fsgbookkeeping.com/a-painterly-playlist/
Note what Smith says about Judith Leyster’s self-portrait:
That must have been his inspiration for Sara’s final painting: