Although the dates are clearly identified at the beginning of chapters, the jumping through time zones becomes somewhat frenetic and I often wanted to skip through the lecture on past lives to get to the present. Smith flips disconcertedly from Sara de Vos, an early seventeenth century painter – one of the few women admitted to the art Guild – to Ellie Shipley in the 1950s when she forges the only painting by Sara de Vos, and then to Ellie’s life as a professor and curator in the twenty-first century when she faces the possibility of her past secret crime ruining her life. When I found myself nodding off through the heavy descriptions of preparing a canvas or muddling through the politics of old Dutch guilds, I read on to find out if Ellie, the forger art student who became renowned as an art historian, could survive her minor indiscretion and her major crime. Although Smith seems more intent on the minute details and history of Dutch painters lives and technique, the plight of his main character, Australian Ellie Shipley, holds the story together. Like Barbara Shapiro’s The Art Forger, Smith creates drama around the lives of the artists and those involved in the art world while educating the reader in art history. Crossing through three time periods, Smith follows the creation, forgery, and final resolution of a fictional Dutch masterpiece. Dominic Smith adds to the list of stories about famous art thefts with his book about an obscure Dutch painter in The Last Painting of Sara de Vos.

The lost painting of sara de vos