The Last Painting of Sara De Vos

“But recently she’s learned that Barent prefers her ideas in the service of his own, so she says nothing.”

As a woman in a patriarchal society, Sara sees herself and her opinions about art, an area in which she has deep knowledge, as subordinate to her husband’s preferences. In this quotation, Sara accommodates herself to the gender relations of the time.

“Sara stops painting altogether until winter arrives and the canals freeze over. One blue afternoon, she sees a young girl trudging through a snowy thicket above a frozen branch of the Amstel. Something about the light, about the girl emerging alone from the wood, rouses her to the canvas. Painting a still life suddenly seems unimaginable.”

Sara’s choice to begin At the Edge of a Wood is inspired in part by a chance sight she sees; her choice of composition and style reflects her own moods. This quotation thus offers insight into the psychology of the artist as creator. 

“[S]he found herself unable to spend the money. Because she would have gladly done the work for free, it seemed ill-gotten. The money also felt like a tangible payback for years of being ignored by her male tutors at the Courtauld Institute. To spend it was to dilute its power.”

One of the central questions in the novel is what motivates Ellie to create the forgery. While many characters in the novel are motivated by financial gain, Ellie’s rationale here is a result of her sense that she is poorly treated in the art world because of her sex. The lucrative pay she receives seems to her to be an acceptable compensation for the sexism she has confronted over her life. This motivation highlights the theme of sexism in the world of art.

“Dutch women didn’t paint landscapes in the seventeenth century—that was the general understanding—because the genre required long hours spent alone outside, a clear impediment to the Holland housewife of the Golden Age. But Sara de Vos seemed to be the single exception, a trained still life painter whose only surviving work was this harrowing outdoor scene.”

There were—and are—many societal barriers to women’s ability to be artists. In this case, woman’s roles as the keeper of the home is the primary impediment to creating art. Sara de Vos’s ability to be the exception to the rule comes about in part because she loses her child and household and is thus unable to occupy the roles usually assigned to women.

“She wonders sometimes if she isn’t painting an allegory of her daughter’s transit between the living and the dead, a girl trudging forever through the snow. It seems maudlin, even to her, but she lies awake each night, listening to the old wooden house tick and moan, retracing her own brushstrokes like the tenets of some delicate and inscrutable Eastern philosophy [….] But it also seems to wick away some of the ungodly anguish.”

While Sara’s preference as an artist seems to be firmly in the camp of creating art for art’s sake, her use of art as a part of her griefwork shows that here, the creative act is about something much more personal. Her use of art in this case is not merely academic; it is about processing emotions she does not otherwise know how to handle. The quotation gives insight into the creative process.

“At dinner, when he tells stories of tulip speculators coming into their wild fortunes, Sara notices a new tone settling in, the hawking voice of a peddler.”

Sara’s disapproval of Barent’s perspective on art shows she prefers to reject the idea of art as a commodity. She is not fond of this change in her husband, either.

“The flowers will make them rich; the paintings will tell their guests that they know beauty when they see it. For the most part they buy the paintings like so many tables and chairs. Only a few, the burghers from Delft and the foreign diplomats, have any eye for the work itself.”

This quotation perfectly captures the concept of art as a commodity. In this case, the art on the walls of owners is a status symbol designed to signal wealth.

“Most of the time he wouldn’t even be thinking about the paintings themselves. He would stare up at them and loop through a cross-weave of associations [….] The thoughts would rush in but eventually strip away, peel back to reveal a kernel of bare sentiment. Eventually, if he sat there long enough he would feel the brute force of nostalgia or a sense of loss or elation and it always seemed to be emanating from a particular painting. Rembrandts, no matter the depiction, brought to mind the desolation of winter.”

What happens when a person engages with a piece of art? In Marty’s case, art is a mirror allowing him to explore himself and get in touch with his emotions. The fact that the particular piece of art rarely matters argues against the idea that there is some inherent meaning in art that comes entirely from the artist. In this description, then, the eye of the beholder is the primary force in giving the art meaning.

“The idea of making something solid and practical sometimes appeals to her. There are no figments or catchments of light to contend with. But neither is there the possibility, she thinks, of rendering the smoke of human emotion itself.”

Sara’s perspective on painting is that it allows her to capture human emotion. Her belief in this role of art is one that pushes back against the idea of art as a commodity.

“So much of the forger’s dominion is theater and subtext, she thinks, a series of enticements. An obscure provenance, suggested by visual cues, is irresistible to a certain kind of buyer—it becomes a story of their own discernment, of plucking a second self from the folds of history.”

Ellie’s description of the psychology of the forger and the art buyer shows that engagement with art is frequently anything other than art for its own sake.

“‘We’re swimming upstream—because we’re women and because our profession knows very little of the Dutch Golden Age. I was lucky [….] Even with good luck on my side, I’m here before the men every morning and I have more students than any of them. Getting tenure was blood sport, let me tell you [….] Do whatever it takes to rein in this dissertation and get on with the next phase of your life. No one can make a career out of a minor Dutch woman painter with one canvas to her name. Keep de Vos in the margins.’”

Meredith Hornsby’s advice to Ellie is rooted in a hard-earned understanding of the gatekeeping role institutions—such as academic art departments—play in keeping women out or limiting who they are if they do manage to gain entrance. Hornsby’s ability to gain entrance and keep her place is dependent upon perpetuating an art history that further marginalizes artists like Sara de Vos. Hornsby’s mentorship of Ellie in this case shows that even when women do manage to break glass ceilings, the deep-rooted sexism of the institutions continues—sometimes with the complicity of women who believe they will lose their places in these institutions if they challenge the norms of the institutions.

“He knows of Rembrandt and the craftsmen of Delft, has heard stories about portrait artists being summoned behind palace walls. Up until this moment, though, he has always thought of painters in the same light as stonemasons or engravers, craftsmen who ply a trade. This painting is entirely different, a scene so ethereal that it flinches in the full light of day.”

Pieter de Groot has a change of heart when it comes to what the work of an artist is and what a work of art is shows; this demonstrates that a person’s perspective about art can change. Sara’s painting inspires this change, which shows the power of art to transform ordinary human experience.

“Helen has the reputation of being a data person with no inherent feeling for art. She’s called in like a ballistics expert to conduct examinations in microscopy, X-ray, infrared, and spectroscopy. The handful of times Ellie has interacted with Helen she’s always gone away with a sense of a misplaced calling, that Helen should have become a UN weapons inspector instead of a painting conservator.”

Helen’s perspective on art is one that emphasizes it as a physical object rather than something intangible. Nevertheless, her revelation of the pentimento of the woman underneath the layers of paint shows that this focus on the material properties of art could offer important insights into the creative process.

“She routinely warns her graduate students not to project mysticism onto the lives and canvases of seventeenth-century Dutch painters [….] Religion had its place, but it was both practical and mercantile; it endured like a sturdy table in a polished kitchen [….] By all accounts, seventeenth-century Dutchmen were inveterate worshippers, brawlers, drinkers, and womanizers. They covered their walls with beautiful paintings for the same reason they drank—to distract themselves from the abyss. Or did Sara de Vos continue painting as a way to sharpen her view of the abyss?”

Ellie offers yet another perspective on why people consume and buy art: They use it as distraction from the realities over which they have no control. In this case, the function of art is to stave off the reality of death.

“She wonders now if the forgery wasn’t a form of retribution, a kind of calculated violence—against Jack and Michael Franke, against the old boy network at the Courtauld Institute, against her own indifferent father. But mostly against the girl standing out on the glassed-in veranda who thought her talents were prodigious and therefore enough.”

Ellie frequently engages in self-reflection in an attempt to understand her transgression of the ethics of the art world. This explanation is one emphasizing her understanding of her act as a response to the sexism she encountered as a young artist.

“‘The auction houses all hire Brits or Swiss or Belgians to flog off their art. It distracts you from the fact that this is not that different from a horse auction.’”

Marty’s cynical but knowing discussion of the trappings of art emphasizes that the business side of art frequently attempts to hide how the sale of art makes it a commodity.

“‘A painting has its own archaeology.’”

Ellie’s description of the process of restoring a work of art is literal in this case—she is describing the layers of paint an artist puts on a canvas. Archaeology is also, however, a figure for the creative process of the artist, and how any number of ingredients go into the creation of a piece of art. The novel’s focus on the history surrounding At the Edge of a Wood is, in a sense, an archaeology of the painting as well.

“‘I think you know what rich people are willing to pay for mounting a little existential meaning on their walls. My wealth is a historical accident, just so we’re clear.’”

Marty accuses Ellie of commodifying art because of how high her consultant fees are. His accusation shows he understands art can, at times, be a commodity, but that the idea makes him uncomfortable.

“‘All art contains desire.’”

Ellie shares this perspective with her students as they discuss the way that Vermeer’s painting of a girl’s open mouth signals her sexual availability. Art, in other words, is always grounded in human experience—even seemingly mundane ones.

“Despite its being midsummer, the lushness of the full foliage feels orchestrated and false. It reminds her of a still life, of striated tulips in a painted vase, of curling lemon rinds against wood grain. Beautiful perhaps, but also an insult, she thinks, to the buried dead up on the hill, to the hundred or so souls who prattled with fever before they drew their last earthly breath. No, it must be in winter, the trees bare, the river frozen. Out of plague season, yes, but true to the desolation of the spirit.”

This passage shows Sara’s act of creating Winter with a Child’s Funeral Procession is not a simple act of re-creating the physical reality of what she sees in front of her, with the implication that the experience of creating and engaging with art is something that transcends ordinary reality.

“Ellie thinks of how the world is governed by couples, how unmarried women make good academics because they’ve been neutered by too much knowledge and bookish pleasure. The world hands them a tiny domain it never cared about to begin with.”

This equivalence between being an academic expert and neutering shows the deep sexism of academic art: In order to be an academic, one must apparently cease to be a woman in the traditional sense.

“She never stopped painting the beautiful fake.”

Ellie uses an implied metaphor here, betraying her sense that her whole life is something of a forgery. This is classic imposter syndrome: Namely, her sense that as a woman, a working-class person, and an Australian indicates that she does not belong in the academic world where she has clearly experienced so much success. Imposter syndrome is frequently related to the many ways institutions make perceived outsiders feel unwelcome.

“You held back. You hoarded. You lived among beautiful things. The paintings on your walls, the Dutch rivers and kitchens, the Flemish peasant frolics, they give off fumes and dull with age, but connect you to a bloodline of want, to shipbuilders and bankers who stared up at them as their own lives tapered off. Like trees, they have breathed in the air around them and now they exhale some of their previous owners’ atoms and molecules. They could last for a thousand years, these paintings, and that buoys you as you drift off, a layer just above sleep.”

The central message of this passage is that art endures even when people do not. Art is thus capable of transcending ordinary human limits that are the result of mortality.