* * *
On the third day of fever, she asks for a hand mirror and a hairbrush. She sits up in bed and brushes her long dark hair out, holding each length between her fingertips. The face in the oval frame belongs to a stranger. Cheeks ablaze, wind-chapped lips, a look of fatigue about the eyes. She hands the mirror back to Tomas in disgust and says, “Do you remember how to size and ground a canvas?” Her voice has recovered, but it remains low and hoarse, some damage to the throat is what the doctor says. He looks at her impatiently, arms folded. “It’s how I won you over. Of course I remember.” She holds her hands up to show him the size and requests a ground of warm, earthen tones. “Are you sure you’re well enough to paint?” he asks. “The doctor forbade any form of exertion.”
She sinks back down to the pillows and closes her eyes. “I’ll paint in bed just to keep you happy.”
A prepared canvas appears beside the bed that afternoon. It’s a foot square, mounted on a wooden strainer made from fence palings. The ground is a little darker than she’d like—more russet than warm clay—but it’s well made, pumiced smooth and even. On the bedside table are the ground pigments that make up her palette: white lead, smalt, yellow ocher, a touch of azurite. She can’t imagine how long she’s been asleep. Tomas is beside her again, bearing soup on a tray. “What are you going to paint?” he asks.
She shrugs and looks out the window. The bare elms are streaked with twilight up on the hill. “Nothing with snow or ice in it.”
He smiles, touches her shoulder, and leaves her to eat and work.
She knows this will be the last thing she ever paints. It briefly overwhelms her with the magnitude of choosing the right subject. Before that first line of pale chalk, before the underdrawing fleshes out into shapes and proportions, there is a stab of grief for all the things she didn’t get to paint. The finches wheeling in the rafters of the barn, Cornelis reading in the arbor, Tomas bent over his roses in the flower garden, apple blossoms, walnuts beside oysters, Kathrijn in the full bloom of her short life, Barent sleeping in a field of lilacs, the Gypsies in the market, the late-night revelers in the taverns … Every work is a depiction and a lie. We rearrange the living, exaggerate the light, intimate dusk when it’s really noonday sun.
Then she begins, banishing the feeling of remorse with gentle lines of pale chalk. Her hands are unsteady, so she first practices on the back of the canvas. She settles on a pose and a depiction before turning the canvas over. She paints a series of lines and textures for an entire afternoon, retooling her hand and her eye. There are bouts of exhaustion, hours where she sleeps with the canvas laid faceup, across her chest, one layer drying at a time. She wants to paint something she has never set down before, something true. Her fevered dreams are overrun with the berry-black eyes of the fish along the riverbed, the scraping of Tomas’s skates up above, the pallid moon through the window of ice. Her skin burns with the memory of it. Sometimes she wakes herself up with her own moaning. Opening her eyes is to come ashore again, to find the stone cottage abundantly solid and straight-edged. She paints another hour, then stares out the window for long stretches. One day, sometime near dusk, Tomas rides his horse up to the window and smiles at her from across the big mare’s white-diamond forehead. It’s called a star, she remembers, this marking on a horse’s head. She wants to remember the names. She wants to remember him looking back at her in the twilight.
* * *
Ellie takes a flashlight and a pair of gloves up to the attic rooms. As she climbs the narrow staircase, the smell of damp is a living thing. It catches in the back of her throat, a visceral reminder of Brooklyn. She fears the worst, that even if there are dozens of paintings up here—squirreled away from the Nazis, is the widow’s claim—that they’ll be damaged beyond repair. The rooms are littered with newspapers and desiccated insects, the walls blotted through with continents of mold. Boxes of mildewing books and clothes, a crate of wooden toys. No one has been up here for a very long time. She continues down the passageway toward a triptych of north-facing windows opaque with grime. Pigeons appear to be nesting in the roof because the floor is splattered with their droppings. Cut into one wall is a crawl space with a little wooden door. She opens it and shines her flashlight into the musty interior, but there’s nothing inside but exposed electrical wiring and cobwebs. She goes back out into the hallway, opening each door. In a tiny room she finds some mutilated luggage and begins to open tattered suitcases and trunks. There are yellowing black-and-white photographs from the 1920s, snapshots from family vacations and postcards from foreign hotels. Children brimming with smiles beside statues in parks and running along northern beaches. Inside a metal trunk, wrapped in a twill blanket, she finds eight canvases, each one rolled and coiled with a ribbon, the tiny puncture holes visible along the edges where they’ve been carefully removed from a stretcher. She cinches her gloves and spreads out the blanket. She unrolls each canvas and finds something to pin down its corners with. Before long she has a spread of Flemish, Dutch, and English paintings, a few from the nineteenth century but a few also from the 1600s. There’s one that feels familiar to her, something about the brushwork and the light. A young woman is sitting at an easel but turned toward the viewer. It’s an open, youthful face, her dark hair pulled beneath a bonnet and her chin set against a broad disc of lace collar. Despite the loose brushwork and the easiness of her pose—elbow propped on the chair, one hand holding a paintbrush like a quill—she’s dressed formally. A working artist would never wear a crimson velvet dress and a high church collar to paint in. She has dressed herself for something momentous. In her left hand she clutches the wooden palette, a dozen brushes, a piece of cloth. Beside her is a half-finished canvas resting against the easel—a young man on horseback framed by a leaded window, peering in, the angling northern sunshine like a corona around his head. He appears to float through space, to radiate off the canvas and into the artist’s workroom. She is still young, the painter, despite the date of 1649 in the lower left corner. She is twenty again and just starting out, turning to take us in as we come through the door, her lips parted as if she’s about to speak.
ALSO BY DOMINIC SMITH
Bright and Distant Shores
The Beautiful Miscellaneous
The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Professor Frima Fox Hofrichter for her expertise on Dutch women painters of the seventeenth century; Stephen Gritt, director of conservation at the National Gallery of Canada, for his insights into the technical aspects of art restoration and conservation; and Ken Perenyi, master art forger, for vetting my fabrications.
Forgery techniques are derived from interviews and from details found in three sources: The Fake’s Progress by Tom Keating, Geraldine Norman, and Frank Norman; Caveat Emptor by Ken Perenyi; and, most important, The Art Forger’s Handbook by Eric Hebborn. The chapter that contains a night fishing scene on the Hudson River draws from reportage about eels, shipwrecks, shellfish, and the Shellfish Protector found in Joseph Mitchell’s iconic New Yorker essay “The Bottom of the Harbor.” The advertisement for the Rent-a-Beats in the first chapter is taken from Fred McDarrah’s 1960 real-life ad in The Village Voice.
Deep gratitude to the late Wendy Weil, for her guidance and wisdom, and to my agents, Emily Forland and Gaby Naher, for their encouragement and expertise. Many thanks to my editors, Sarah Crichton and Jane Palfreyman, for their faith and insight, and to my early readers—Karen Olsson, S. Kirk Walsh, Michael Parker, and James Magnuson. And a big thank-you to Jeremy Pollet for being my driver, tour guide, and lunch date in and around Edgewater, New Jersey.
A final and enormous thank-you to my wife, Emily, and my two daughters, Mikaila and Gemma, for always believing in me and helping me steal the time to write.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dominic Smith grew up in Australia and now lives in Austin, Texas. He’s the author of three other novels, Bright and Distant Shores, The Beautiful Miscel
laneous, and The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre. His short fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, and the Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row Journal, among other publications. He is the recipient of a new works grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts, a Dobie Paisano Fellowship, and a Michener Fellowship. He teaches writing in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. For more information, visit his website, www.dominicsmith.net. Or sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Author’s Note
Part I
Upper East Side (November 1957)
Amsterdam/Berckhey (Spring 1635)
Brooklyn (November 1957)
Amsterdam (Winter 1636)
Upper East Side (May 1958)
Sydney (July 2000)
Part II
Amsterdam (Spring 1637)
New Jersey (August 1958)
Brooklyn (August 1958)
En Route to Sydney (August 2000)
Manhattan (September 1958)
Amsterdam (May 1637)
Sydney (August 2000)
Manhattan (September 1958)
Leaving Amsterdam (Spring 1637)
Sydney (August 2000)
Manhattan (September 1958)
Heemstede (Summer 1637)
Manhattan (October 1958)
Sydney (August 2000)
Heemstede (Summer 1637)
Manhattan (October 1958)
Sydney (August 2000)
Heemstede (Winter 1649/Summer 2000)
Also by Dominic Smith
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Sarah Crichton Books
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2016 by Dominic Smith
All rights reserved
First edition, 2016
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Dominic, 1971–
The last painting of Sara De Vos: a novel / Dominic Smith. — first edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-374-10668-3 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-374-71404-8 (e-book)
1. Baalbergen, Sarah van, 1607– approximately 1638—Fiction. 2. Women artists—Netherlands—Fiction. 3. Painting, Dutch—17th century—Fiction. 4. Art—Forgeries—Fiction. 5. Art historians—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.M5815 L38 2016
813'.6—dc23
2015033152
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This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
The Last Painting of Sara de Vos Page 30