The Last Painting of Sara De Vos

Having met Griet, Sara decides to use her ability to paint and offer Griet a memorial to her dead children. The work she creates is Winter with a Child’s Funeral Procession. Although Sara bases the painting on what she can see of the town, she transforms the warm, green season into winter on her canvas, and the ruins of the town into the backdrop for a funeral procession. Using a camera obscura, which she mounts on the surviving tower in the town, Sara paints the funeral scene from on high—the way God would see it.

Tomas is intrigued by the camera obscura and asks Sara if she will teach him to use it. She agrees to do so but realizes later that Tomas likely has romantic feelings for her. She realizes she reciprocates these feelings when she is flattered by Tomas’s praise for her painting.

After a month of going out with Marty, Ellie is still not sure if their relationship is a business or a personal one. This confusion clears up when Marty invites her on a weekend away to go antique hunting in Albany. Before they leave, Marty leaves a wrapped painting in her apartment. It is the forgery, but Marty insists she not open it until later, so Ellie does not know this at the time.

Ellie and Marty go to an estate sale in a house, where they share their first kiss and eventually end up at a hotel run by a couple. After a few drinks and some quite awkward kisses, Marty steps out while Ellie bathes and puts on some lingerie she bought for the weekend. When Marty comes back, he and Ellie have sex. This is Elle’s first time having sex, so she attributes the awkwardness and sense of wrongness to her own ineptitude. She falls asleep.

When Ellie wakes up, Marty is gone. She is hungry, so she goes down to get some food and find out if there is any word of Marty. The wife-owner tells her that Marty drove off hours ago. As Marty’s absence drags on, Ellie begins to feel uneasy. She decides to snoop through Marty’s fancy luggage. In the luggage she discovers a very fine sweater with a tag that lists the owner’s name— “Martijn de Groot”—and a phone number. She calls the number and asks for Jake Alpert. The person who answers the phone tells her she has reached the house of Rachel and Marty de Groot. Ellie realizes Marty tricked and seduced her.

Ellie returns to Brooklyn by train. She unpacks the painting Marty left and realizes it is the forgery. She places the forgery and original side by side, then calls Gabriel to tell him that she has both paintings. Realizing her predicament and how poorly she has been living in her shabby apartment, Ellie makes some decisive actions. She packs up just a few belongings, including her typewriter and dissertation. She leaves a letter for the landlord and writes another letter to her dissertation committee explaining her plan to return in three months to defend her dissertation, which she has now focused on women artists of the Dutch Golden Age.

Ellie takes $10,000 from her stash and flies to Amsterdam. Once there, she buys just the kind of clothes an academic would wear, visits the museums, and finally gets to work in earnest on finishing her dissertation. Ellie has begun a new life.

Marty’s night and day after the trip to Albany go rather differently. After he sleeps with Ellie, he drives back to New York, sick with guilt and ruminating on what he has done and why. Back when the original painting first disappeared, he felt a great release, but later he came to see the theft as “an attack against his household and his bloodline and his ego” (248). Now, however, he understands he treated Ellie like prey, “lured her out of the woods like some rawboned animal and now he has blood on his hands” (248).

Unable to face Rachel, Marty spends the night in his office. He begins writing a letter to explain himself to Rachel, but then realizes the letter is to the dead—the dog Laika who died on the Sputnik mission, Rachel’s miscarriages, and the Marty who gave up the trumpet when he was 15.

The day of the exhibition of women painters of the Dutch Golden Age arrives, and Marty shows up in a tuxedo and shoes so tight they make his feet bleed. Without his glasses and with the ambient noise causing many problems with his hearing aid, Marty has a hard time both seeing and hearing. He is just able to hear when Ellie takes the stage. After the speech, Max Culkins leads Ellie over to Marty and makes a quip about convincing Marty to leave some of his art to the Museum of New South Wales.

Once Max is gone, Marty and Ellie’s long-anticipated and feared conversation takes place. Although Ellie assumed Marty came to ruin her life, his whole manner makes it clear he has instead come to ask forgiveness for entering her life in such a personal way and under false pretenses. The two talk, and Marty eventually asks if they can go somewhere private to attend to his bleeding feet. Ellie feels alternating bouts of anger and pity at the old man in front of her, so she yields.

As they talk, she realizes Marty has no idea that the fake is at the museum, but she eventually tells him it is. Thinking it over, Marty realizes he should have suspected as much given how shady Gabriel appeared during the meeting to hand over the reward check. Marty and Ellie talk about their lives since the trip to Albany. Ellie tells Marty that her whole life since doing the forgery was itself a kind of “beautiful fake” (261). The forgery was the last painting she ever did, and no matter where she went or what she accomplished, she always expected to be unveiled as an imposter and forger who had no right to inhabit her carefully constructed life as an academic. She plans to take the forgery to the Dutch museum and tell them the truth.

Marty’s reflection on the aftermath of the weekend is somewhat different. After the weekend in Albany, Marty eventually came to realize how stifled his privileged life had made him; he came clean with Rachel, and they managed to have some moments of happiness together. The hardest thing for Marty was the eventual realization that although the Jake Alpert persona was fake, being in Ellie’s company back then made him into a man he liked.

The pair decides to look at Winter with a Child’s Funeral Procession, which Ellie must describe in detail since Marty’s old eyes cannot see the painting in any detail. Sara de Vos, Ellie tells Marty, became obsessed with “winter and ice” (266). This painting shows that Sara kept growing and changing after what was supposed to have been her one great work.

Ellie takes Marty back to his hotel, and the two part ways. Marty turns off his hearing aid so he can sink into a contemplative state allowing him to escape from the world. This time he thinks about his life “lived among beautiful things” (269) that are remnants of all these other past lives of people. The art is enough to “connect you to a bloodline of want, to shipbuilders and the bankers who started yo at them as their own lives tapered off” (269). Marty has regrets about his life, it seems.

This last chapter of the novel alternates between narration by Sara in 1649 and narration by Ellie in 2000 as their stories converge in Heemstede.

By 1649, Sara and Tomas are a couple. They live in a stone cottage behind the main house, and Sara has settled into a happy domestic life that mostly involves helping around the estate. She does not paint and does not really miss it. One day, she and Tomas go out to their summer shack to picnic. They go ice-skating on the river that night, and Sara falls through the ice. Tomas manages to rescue her, but she develops a deadly infection. In the last days of her life, she feverishly paints her last work, a self-portrait.

In 2000, Ellie goes to the Netherlands to return the forgery and confess her crime. Hendrik, the standoffish courier, is there to meet her. He tells her that an American buyer for the painting (the forgery, unbeknownst to him) has purchased the painting, does not want it to be displayed, and wants Ellie to take charge of the painting for him. Hendrik gives Ellie a note from the buyer—Marty, in turns out—in which he tells Ellie to take care of the painting, which she takes to mean she should destroy it. She burns it and feels a profound gratitude to Marty for taking care of the physical evidence of where she went wrong in life.

Ellie quickly pivots to a new project. When she finds out the name of the person from whom the funeral procession painting came (the widow Edith Zeller), Ellie proposes to Hendrik that the two of them co-author a paper reassessing the career of Sara de Vos in light of the new painting. Hendrik is happy with the prospect. His career in art history is a dead end and co-authoring a paper with Ellie will be the making of him. He and Ellie book a room in the bed and breakfast that Mrs. Zeller owns. Mrs. Zeller occasionally sells a painting to pay for repairs to the bed and breakfast, and it is likely she is sitting on top of precious works, including others by Sara de Vos.

Mrs. Zeller allows them to search her collection, which she inherited from a distant relative. Ellie finds the actual last painting of Sara de Vos. Dated 1649, Sara’s painting is of herself as a young painter just starting out. Within in the painting is the bare outline of Tomas on a horse. The painting captures Sara’s desire to be remembered as a painter, one who could complete the many works she never got to because of her untimely death.