Novels about painters and paintings have been in vogue recently. Prominent contemporary offerings include Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring and Donna Tart's epic The Goldfinch.
If Australian author Dominic Smith's wonderful fourth novel The Last Painting of Sara de Vos follows suit, what it adds to the literary communion with oils is a fresh, feminist portrait of the artist and a nuanced evocation of those who forge works of art.
A triptych, the book is a story in three interconnected parts. Each is connected to the other by a single fictional image, At the Edge of the Wood, produced by a master painter during the Dutch Golden Age.
That the artist in question is a woman - the titular heroine - is in itself remarkable. But through his skilful control of voice and plot, Smith turns this notable snippet of invention into rich narrative by opening up Sara's troubled inspiration for her work and intersecting this with the equally fraught lives of 1950s Upper East Side owner of the piece, Marty, and celebrated Australian art historian, Ellie.
Therein, Smith paints the everyday struggles and gifted creativity of 17th Century Sara with the same attention to detail and verity as he applies to contemporary Ellie; the stunning artistry of both limited by the explicit and implicit social constraints that come with being women.
