53 pages • 1 hour read
The Last Painting of Sara De Vos
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Part 2, Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2
Chapter 1 Summary: “Amsterdam: Spring 1637”
By spring, the financial situation of the de Vos family has worsened, especially since the potential market for their tulip paintings collapsed right along with the bursting of the tulip bubble. Barent still works at the bookbindery, while Sara has taken work as a catalogue illustrator; despite this work, Barent eventually receives notice that he will be sent to debtors’ prison unless he pays the remainder of what he owes the guild.
Sara, desperate to help, asks for permission from Joost Blim—the patronizing head of the Guild of St. Luke’s—to paint and sell some works to pay off the family’s debt. After listening to him complaining about the percentage of the Guild’s fees that go to the orphans of Amsterdam, Sara explains that painting is the only way she can imagine paying off the debt.
She doesn’t mention At the Edge of a Wood when Blim asks for some proof of the quality of her work; she knows she will never show the painting to anyone. Part of Blim’s consideration is the question of what work other women in the guild have done, and he notes they don’t paint much since they married. Sara says nothing to this point, but she remembers how hard it was to balance Kathrijn in her arms while trying to paint. Blim relents and gives Sara permission to paint and sell some appropriately feminine still lifes to cover the debt to the guild.
Relieved, Sara goes home after the meeting to tell Barent, but he is not there. In a letter, he tells her he is skipping out on his debt to go do manual work elsewhere and experience his grief alone. Sara feels utterly abandoned.
Chapter 2 Summary: “New Jersey: August 1958”
After several frustrating months of dead ends with the police and the insurance company in the search for At the Edge of a Wood, Marty hires Red Hammond, a private detective, to look for the painting. Red figures out that the person responsible is someone—a man, he assumes—named Shipley. Red’s plan is to stake out Shipley’s Brooklyn apartment.
Marty feels a host of emotions at this news. He feels irritation that he has to associate with someone like Red, whose obesity and New Jersey location offends Marty’s affluent sensibilities. He feels eagerness to get back a painting that he associates with his family’s Dutch heritage, and because he feels a sense of violation when he thinks of someone getting into his bed to steal the painting. Rachel seems to have come out her depression, so much so that she now participates in a social club; Marty thinks the absence of the painting over their bed somehow has something to do with this improvement, so Marty also feels reluctance to recover a painting whose evil influence cast a pall over their lives.
In the end, Marty gives Red a week and $250 to surveil this Shipley.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Brooklyn: August 1958”
Back in 1958, Ellie is at last making progress on her dissertation. Energized by the research for her forgery and the ability to surreptitiously study At the Edge of a Wood, which Gabriel has in storage nearby, Ellie added a chapter on Sara de Vos to her dissertation, which had been stalled up until then.
Meredith Hornsby, Ellie’s dissertation advisor, meets with Ellie at Columbia to discuss the new material on Sara. Meredith thinks it is too risky to include the information on de Vos because the new dissertation material is based on one painting held by a private owner who is unlikely to give permission to include a photo of the work in the dissertation. Meredith’s objection is based on a lie Ellie tells Hornsby to explain how she has access to the painting; in telling this lie, Ellie risks exposure.
Meredith also takes Ellie to task for sounding too much like an angry woman in her argument about the impact of Sara’s still life work on At the Edge of a Wood. In a world in which even women like Meredith get tenure through outworking the men and a useful academic marriage, sounding too angry may be enough to stop Ellie from getting through the dissertation process and becoming an academic. Her advice to Ellie is that she keep Sara de Vos “in the margins” (110). Ellie disagrees and ends the meeting feeling let down by her academic advisor.
Chapter 4 Summary: “En Route to Sydney: August 2000”
Marty is on a long flight from New York to Sydney. He knows personal delivery of the painting seems an extreme act for a man who is almost 90-years-old, but Marty wants to see Ellie, who “was still alive and by all accounts had made something of herself” (117) after having had a brief relationship with Marty. Marty is not sure if he is in Australia to “bear witness or to remind [Ellie] how she started out” (117). He finally concludes that he is in Australia to “pay homage to an old, scalding regret” (117). Marty—it is revealed much later in the novel—had a fling with Ellie without revealing until the very end that he was the owner of At the Edge of a Wood.
Marty is at the end of his life. His body is old and frail, and he is dependent on an in-home worker to wash his sheets when he wets the bed occasionally. Rachel has been dead for 10 years. What Marty holds on to is the comfort wealth can still buy him.
Marty meets Max Culkins, the director of the Art Museum of New South Wales, to hand off the painting. The entire meeting annoys him. Max is not particularly deferential to him, fobs him off on a curator when he offers Marty a tour of the museum, and does nothing to facilitate a meeting with Ellie—the person Marty really wants to see. Even more curious to Marty is the “quiet look of consternation” (121) on Max’s face when Marty finally does reveal the painting.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Manhattan: September 1958”
Red Hammond tracks down Ellie and gives Marty her business card and a photo of her while she is working. Marty is surprised that she is a woman and so unkempt, given the meticulous work he imagines forgery requires. Marty sits on this information for a while, not quite sure of what to do. He shares the news with his brain-trust, a group of four men with whom he plays squash at his athletic club.
Marty wants to find out more about Ellie before he turns her over to the police or insurance company, although his friends advise him against interacting with her. They scoff when Marty tells him the theory of the painting being cursed. One of the friends, who works at Sotheby’s, tells Marty that a painting is “oil and pigment on scraps of linen or hide and sunlight passing through prisms of color. What we’re trying to buy, when we buy art, is ourselves” (129). When Ellie stole the painting, the friend argues, she stole a part of Marty, and the proper response is to “feel outraged” (129). Marty’s friends help him to come up with a plan: Marty, in the guise of being an art collector named Jake Alpert, will engage Ellie’s consulting services in buying works by Dutch masters at an upcoming auction.
Meanwhile, Rachel’s recovery from her depression continues. Marty agrees over dinner that night to take a river cruise along the river Seine to visit the homes of great artists. Marty is not really listening during this conversation; he is instead thinking of how relieved he is that his wife is happier, especially after the most recent miscarriage. Without really talking about it, both agreed to stop trying for more children after the second miscarriage. Rachel wasn’t interested in adoption.
After dinner, Marty sits in his study at a desk he inherited from his father and looks at the list of children’s names he used to carry around in his pocket. He feels a sense of loss because the names are “all the children they would never have” (135). He calls Ellie to set a date to go to the auction with him. Looking at the forgery as he talks with Ellie, Marty is surprised by the sense of admiration he feels for her and the forgery.
Part 2, Chapters 1-5 Analysis
In these chapters, Smith further develops the themes of sexism in the world of art and the psychology of the art collector.
The impact of gender on the lives of Sara as an artist and Ellie as a would-be-artist turned art historian is, for the most part, expressed as institutional and personal roadblocks. Sara’s confrontation with the forces of sexism and patriarchy is direct: Joost Blim is the gatekeeper controlling whether Sara can be a working artist in Amsterdam. Sara bristles at his blatant sexism, and her inability to resist pointing out the problem with the proportions of the painting hanging in the headquarters of the guild shows her resentment over the way her expertise is unacknowledged because she is a woman. No matter how talented she is, Sara must accept these limitations or else completely sink under the burden of the debt.
It is not just institutional roadblocks that hold her back; Sara must also confront roadblocks resulting from her relationship with Barent. Because she is married to Barent in the patriarchal society of Amsterdam, she exercises little control over their finances but must still bear the burden when Barent abandons her. That her work is assigned less value because she is a woman and working in genres that are less valued exacerbates her economic difficulties.
Hundreds of years later, Ellie, too, confronts institutional roadblocks, and the ones she encounters are particularly insidious and hard to attack. Ellie wants to write art history that is more attentive to the work of Sara, but her dissertation advisor’s old-school feminism stands in her way. Meredith’s insistence that marginalizing Sara’s work is the best play means that art history for this period will remain the purview of men and thus reinforce the sexist line that women cannot be artists. The sense of betrayal Ellie feels when Meredith explains all of this to her shows that having women enter academia in small numbers is not enough to end institutional sexism if becoming part of the institution requires perpetuating that sexism.
Nevertheless, Meredith’s advice is pragmatic and politically sage. She is, in effect, encouraging Ellie to do what Sara did: go along to get along. Her advice to avoid conflict and explicitly feminist critique of art history is one given to an entire generation of female academics during second-wave feminism in the United States. What is interesting about Ellie, however, is her willingness to transgress institutional norms, whether by creating a forgery or continuing to focus on women artists. The lesson seems to be that women may well be punished for violating institutional norms rooted in sexism, but they must do so to escape roadblocks thrown in their way.
The other theme Smith develops in this section is the meaning of art for the collector. Marty is a typical art collector. He is rich, sophisticated, knowledgeable about the business end of art, and feels that the art in his possession is an important part of his identity—particularly his Dutch ancestry. For Marty, the acquisition of art reflects his ability to control, or at least limit, the parts of his life that terrify him—childlessness, which he sees as a lack of a legacy; fear of aging and death; and the erosion of love in his marriage. Marty’s interactions with art, though, are not ones that seem to be about any essential characteristic of the art works themselves. Instead, Marty is concerned by what art signifies about him.
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