The Last Painting of Sara De Vos

For much of American and European history, women have traditionally been considered either outsiders or mere objects in the world of art. Women’s status as models rather than creators of art, unnamed helpers rather than artists whose signatures appear on paintings, and—even now—as people who are seen as intruders in related artistic disciplines such as art history reflects the impact of society’s subordination of women to men. The structure that supports this subordination is the patriarchy—a system in which power is in the hands of men. Through the struggles of Sara, Ellie, and Meredith Hornsby, Dominic Smith illuminates the many ways women are disadvantaged by and struggle to overcome the forces of patriarchy in the very particular world of art.

Sara’s life as an artist is determined in large part by her connection to Barent and her sex. Barent makes the financial decisions for the family (disastrous ones), fully expects Sara to serve as a helpmeet to him as he produces his art and feels entitled to direct Sara in what she may paint in order to support the family. No one questions this role, and the guild—the central institution that controls the production and sale of art in Amsterdam during the Golden Age—reinforces this by tying Sara’s ability to sell her art to the choices of her husband.

Sara also encounters obstacles because of the way her sex shapes her day-to-day life. She must balance childcare with her artistic practice, and housekeeping—a quite arduous process in the 17th century—consumes so much time that “Dutch women didn’t paint landscapes in the seventeenth century […] because the genre required long hours spent alone outside, a clear impediment to the Holland housewife of the Golden Age” (31). Sara loses the gendered props of her identity—child, husband, home—during periods of her life, resulting in some space and time to create her masterworks. The fact that it takes devastating tragedies for Sara to produce her transcendent works underscores that being a woman in a patriarchal society of the 17th century is incompatible with being a working artist. Her last work—a self-portrait she has the liberty to create because she is dying—is the clearest expression of the way women must surrender almost everything in order to call themselves artists.

Hundreds of years later, the stories of Ellie and Meredith Hornsby demonstrate that women must still pay enormous costs in order to enter the world of art. In Meredith’s case, becoming an art historian requires much more than what is asked of men. Meredith tells Ellie, “Even with good luck on my side, I’m here before the men every morning and I have more students than any of them. Getting tenure was blood sport” (110). Meredith is part of the second wave of women who fought against exclusion from traditionally male spaces like academia. When Meredith tells Ellie to “[k]eep de Vos in the margins” (110), the advice is meant to help Ellie, but this advice shows that one of the costs of being included is to perpetuate the marginalization of women like Sara de Vos.

Explicitly, Ellie chooses another way—writing her dissertation on Dutch women artists of the Golden Age and later curating the Sydney exhibit—and in covert, transgressive ways when she becomes a forger. She struggles to understand why she violated the ethics of her field by doing the forgery. By the end of the novel, she comes to understand this one transgression was the break with the past permitting her to break other boundaries and become the academic she wants to be.

Still, Ellie pays many tolls because of her sex. Ellie is an art historian rather than an artist, and the construction of that life is only possible because of her paying gig as a conservationist and the mobility she experiences as a childfree, single woman. Ellie pays a psychological toll—imposter syndrome—because she is a working-class woman from a settler colony who must present as an expert on art of a society built in part on her very exclusion and subordination.

The way in which these women manage to subvert patriarchy’s subordination of women is instructive. At the Edge of a Wood comes from Sara’s decision to use her painting to do her griefwork, although she feels compelled to paint over herself in the final version. At the end of her life, impending death allows her to escape this need to hide her signature as an artist. This painting, along with the other two, reveal her as the master she truly is, and secures her places among the more lauded male artists of the Golden Age.

Ellie’s ability to be heard and seen in her chosen field only comes once she is willing to recover the lost history of women artists and center them in her work—first with the dissertation and later with the art exhibit in Sydney, her discovery of Sara’s work, and her mentoring the next generation of art historians (Hendrik) to move women’s work to the center. Smith’s ultimate message seems to be that women must be willing to tell their own stories if they are ever to claim their own power.