A visiting shipper, Pieter de Groot, observes Sara’s woodland scene and purchases it. Sara then turns to the Guild for help, which agrees to help pay down her debts in exchange for an auction of her works from which the Guild will take a commission. When Barent is posed for debtor’s prison, he abandons Sara. Sara and Barent create paintings illegally and without signatures to sell outside the Guild, and in so doing, run afoul of the Guild. In grief, Sara paints a picture of her daughter at the edge of the woods, looking down below at skaters on a frozen river, caught between two worlds –the living, and the dead. However, the death of their daughter and Barent’s inability to complete commissions on time plunge the family into debt. Indeed, Sara is the first woman admitted to the Guild. In 1636, Sara de Vos and her husband, Barent, are painters belonging to the Amsterdam artists’ Guild of Saint Luke. The plot revolves around the only known surviving painting of Sara de Vos, At the Edge of a Wood. The novel is set in three different eras: the 1950s, the 1630s, and the year 2000. Ellie attempts to learn more about obscure, but superbly talented, seventeenth-century Dutch painter Sara de Vos. The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, a novel by Dominic Smith, focuses on Ellie Shipley, an art historian and former forger. NOTE: This study guide refers specifically to the 2016 Sarah Chrichton Books/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux First Edition of the Last Painting of Sara de Vos, by Dominic Smith.
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