Join us to discuss The Last Painting of Sarah de Vos by Dominic Smith. In 1631, Sara de Vos becomes the first woman to be admitted as a master painter to the Guild of St. Luke in Holland. Three hundred years later, “At the Edge of a Wood,” her haunting winter scene of a girl watching skaters at dusk, is her only surviving work. It hangs in the bedroom of a Park Avenue coop of a wealthy Manhattanite, a descendant of the original owner. Meanwhile, in the grungier reaches of Brooklyn, an Australian art history grad student struggling to stay afloat in New York agrees to paint a forgery of the landscape for a dubious art dealer. Half a century later, she’s a prominent curator back home in Sydney, mounting an exhibition of female Dutch painters of the Golden Age. Both versions of “At the Edge of the Wood” by Sara de Vos are en route to her museum, threatening to unravel her life and reputation.
If you’d like to read ahead, January’s book is Glass Houses by Louise Penny. Have a book suggestion for the Book Chat? Email Marsha Blumenthal.