The Last Painting of Sara De Vos

The museum turns over the paintings to the thorough examination of Helen Birch, a specialist who uses scientific tools and techniques to examine them for authenticity. Max dismisses Ellie’s efforts to deliver the news to Marty in case his is the forgery, ending Ellie’s latest attempt to avoid catastrophe.

Ellie is in a state of panic and resignation. She remembers when Marty first met her under false pretenses as Jake Alpert, so she is sure his arrival with the painting means her no good. The forgery is not likely to pass muster as a copy made by Sara herself because Ellie used a synthetic color to create certain colors in her forgery, not knowing that years later art historians would discover these colors were produced with lead-tin yellow.

The possibility that Winter with a Child’s Funeral Procession, a work more recent than At the Edge of a Wood, is authentic would also professionally damage Ellie. Her career and recently published book are premised on the idea that At the Edge of a Wood is by an artist whose grief over the death of her daughter gave her the power to create one great, last work in a world in which such art was the purview of men. If there is a second painting, this theory of what made Sara de Vos paint and what made her stop is entirely wrong.

Ellie watches an ill-fated attempt to bring a refrigerator over to the house of a neighbor on Scotland Island, then she begins looking back over the journals and research she did during the time when she was working on the forgery. As she reads, she is surprised by “a strain of anger burning beneath the notes that she barely recognizes. She was the least political person she knew back then, so it certainly wasn’t a Marxist agenda that drew her in” (147) to the plot to forge the painting. The anger was old by 1957, and Ellie can trace it all the way back to when she was 16.

The year she was 16, Ellie’s art teacher got her a summer job at Jack and Michael Franke’s restoration shop. The work was hard, boring, and smelly (the fumes gave Ellie migraines for which her mother mocked her). The brothers were none too honest. They’d overcharge clients who came in for art restoration or else say the paintings were beyond restoration, buy them for a low price, and then sell them for a high price if the work was valuable. They were crooks who did a steady trade in Dutch and Flemish masters.

The experience that crystalized Ellie’s anger was when Michael Franke had her restore some brushwork but insulted the results as proof that Ellie’s “sort” (150)—she was not clear if he meant her sex, class, or religion—was not meant for a career in art. She left, and the brothers sent a bad report to her art teacher. Ellie’s belief that her restoration was good was confirmed when she saw the painting for sale with her brushwork still intact. The art teacher stopped mentoring her after the incident. From then on, restoration work was always accompanied by “a sense that she had no business engaging in this work” (150).

Thinking back on her feelings at that age, Ellie “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” (150), and her own naïve belief that talent would be enough to gain entrance into the world of art. A message from Helen Birch requesting a meeting the next day to talk about some irregularities in the paintings puts an end to these ruminations.

In character as Jake Alpert—a man in need of some expertise as he builds his collection of Dutch Masters—Marty meets Ellie. She clumsily walks in her heels and sits up front with the driver of the car that brings her—both indicating she is not particularly sophisticated. Her face is that of a person descended from common people, but Marty, always the snob, is shocked by the intelligence in her eyes.

Before the auction, Marty asks her opinion on which paintings he should acquire, and she directs him to some gems. She is excited, earnest, and knowledgeable about the paintings, so much that Marty feels compelled to display his own knowledge about paintings and how art auctions work in order to avoid embarrassing himself. Her intent examination of the paintings with a loupe convinces him that she has some intensity of feeling—“devotion” (157) possibly—when it comes to art, but she explains that she is simply shortsighted. Marty goes out of his way to show off for Ellie.

Marty tells her about the money involved in this business side of art. He shares interesting tidbits, like the fact that “buxom female nudes sell better than skinny ones or males. Which seems intuitive enough. Also, size matters. If you can’t fit it into an uptown elevator then it adds a layer of complication” (158). When the auction starts, Marty bids on the painting Ellie suggested, then, as seeing how “[s]he bites her bottom lip, spellbound; she could be watching a boxing match with that look of bloodlust” (159), he asks her to do the bidding for him for additional paintings. She cannot quite bring herself to do it.

Ellie’s earnestness and discomfort amid the elites at the auction convince Marty that Ellie “was not the calculating mind behind the forgery swap. No, she was the subject matter expert, the hired brush, the art savant who’s probably never eaten an oyster or gone to a jazz club” (161). Marty “wants to teach her things and dupe her at exactly the same time” (161). Marty feels sexual attraction.

Sara leaves Amsterdam for Heemstede to enter the service of Cornelis Groen, an old bachelor who agreed to take a year of service to discharge Barent’s debts. Groen talks in a rambling fashion and seems kind. Sara is pleasantly surprised by the size and appointment of her quarters. Even more gratifying is the man’s art collection. He has an entire room devoted to his art, and Sara is impressed that the art seems to be arranged by type until Groen tells her this is Barent’s doing. The room is like a little museum.

Groen takes Sara to a little replica of Heemstede. The town is built around a bleachworks and legally owned by Groen. Before the plague came and killed most of the inhabitants, the town was a thriving place. Now the people have mostly left because they associate the town with death; nearby locals even burned the town because they thought it was cursed with the plague. Groen hired Barent to paint landscapes of the town in the room that holds the replica, but Barent, slow as always, never finished. Sara’s task will be to finish this work. Groen wants a painting of the town before it entirely fades away. The replica will be his legacy as he is childless and will leave everything to a nephew in Leiden.

Sara demurs at first. She tells Groen she is not trained in landscapes and buildings. Groen’s kindly mask slips after Sara tells him most artists are not interested in such tedious work. Given the debt, Groen says he is sure that Sara will be willing to take on the task. Sara senses something “coarser” (171) in the old man for the first time. He means to take advantage of her situation.

Ellie finally has her meeting with Helen to examine the three paintings. Helen’s examination confirms that Winter with a Child’s Funeral Procession is likely authentic. As Ellie suspected, her failure to use lead-tin yellow is the tell that distinguishes the fake from the original At the Edge of a Wood. Helen’s work reveals an even more stunning difference. Using x-rays, Helen uncovered in the original a painted-over image (called a pentimento) of a woman watching the figure of the girl in the painting. Helen concludes that the forger got most of the technical aspects of the painting down but missed the true essence of the painting.

Marty has worked at setting up some cover for his Jake Alpert persona, including renting a post office box where he receives an invoice for $90 from Ellie. He realizes he cannot pay her with a check because she will discover who he really is. He instead agrees to meet with her at a jazz club called the Sparrow, ostensibly so he can pay her in cash.

At the club, Marty and Ellie share details about their lives. Marty’s story is part fabrication, part truth: He tells her he is a widower and works as a patent attorney. He tells the truth about being the son of immigrants, giving up the trumpet at 15 because his father thought it was childish, and loving jazz.

At Ellie’s suggestion, the pair decide to eat takeout pizza on the shore of the Hudson River. Their conversation, already stilted because Ellie is socially awkward, devolves when Marty complains about Ellie’s fees, which he thinks are high because she ”know[s] what rich people are willing to pay for mounting a little existential meaning on their walls” (188). They take a cab to her apartment. Marty hangs around her neighborhood to watch her through her window. He eventually shows up at her door with coffee and ice cream as a sort of apology. After hesitating to let this strange man in her apartment, she relents.

As they talk, Ellie constantly stumbles into areas of conversation that would be painful if Marty were really Jake Apert (his dead wife, for example). She reveals she has no hard feelings regarding Marty’s cracks about the fees. She tells him she’d do her work for free, really. She explains that art restoration is a strange part of the art world: “There are people who look at art, people who buy it, and people who make it. I’m in a whole separate category—I mend it, bring it back to life” (192). Getting paid to do this work seems almost unfair.

When Marty asks about her first encounter with art, she tells him her father saw the Armory Show—the event said by many to have ushered in modern art in the 20th century. Ellie’s father told her that one woman fainted when she saw Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912)—the avant-garde work that seemed most to capture the break with tradition. Ellie explains that story meant her “first encounter with art [was] a story about what it could do to people” (193).

Ellie falls asleep while Marty talks, so Marty takes this opportunity to snoop. Marty finds the part of the At the Edge of a Wood photograph Ellie cut off, the one of his bed. He feels angry and violated, so he heads home. Rachel has waited up for him, and he lies about where he has been. She says he smells like paint.

Groen, Sara, and house servant Tomas go to Heemstede so Sara can do some sketches of the town. Sara wanders around on her own and encounters Griet, the last remaining town resident and a woman rumored to have been driven insane by the death of her entire family from the plague. Moved by the woman’s grief, Sara tells the story of how she lost Kathrijn to the plague as well. Sara asks Griet’s permission to come back and sketch the town later.

Ellie meets Marty again, this time bringing a list of Dutch Golden Age paintings by women. Despite some misgivings, she chooses to include At the Edge of a Wood on the list. She lies when Marty asks if she has ever seen it. Although she tells him she thinks the painting is held in a private collection, the truth is that the painting is in her apartment because Gabriel had to move it from storage.

The meeting with Marty is further complicated because Ellie, who has terrible instincts when it comes to men, cannot figure out if they are on a date or meeting for business. The meeting is likely a date: They eat at a Spanish restaurant and see a showing of Gigi, a 1958 musical comedy in which the title character engages in an ambiguous relationship with a rich playboy. The theme of the film makes Ellie uncomfortable, perhaps because she senses something untoward in her relationship with Marty. Marty tells Ellie to invoice him for the meeting, underscoring the economic dimensions of the interaction. Marty calls later to arrange a Sunday date with Ellie, to which she enthusiastically agrees.