It was Stephen who first turned me on to lead-tin yellow and its fascinating history. I was fortunate enough to collaborate with Stephen Gritt, the head of conservation at the National Gallery of Canada. More than any other novel I’ve written, this book relied on the knowledget of experts. The level of artistic detail the author applies and describes so aptly allows readers to see the images. Smith writes that his precise prose is due, in part, to his collaboration with art experts. The Proposition by Judith Leyster, most famous Dutch baroque female painter Unfortunately for Ellie, two different versions of the painting appear. And finally, in the year 2000, Smith brings in the bleaching of age and spiderweb of cracks: there is to be a Women of the Dutch Golden Age retrospective featuring At the Edge of a Wood in Sydney, Australia, curated by Ellie Shipley. She used a spray gun to mist the picture with the antique varnish she’d set aside.Īuthor Smith builds the layers of his novel - The Last Painting of Sara de Vos - with an equivalent exacting detail the story’s base occurs in Amsterdam in the spring of 1636 when impoverished artist Sara de Vos, the first female admitted to the prestigious artist’s Guild, paints At the Edge of a Wood. He applies the color of 1957 Manhattan and Ellie Shipley’s forgery of that painting. She worked a spiderweb of cracks into the canvas from behind, using a soft rubber ball. After the transparent glazes, she bleached the painting under an ultraviolet light for a week and cured it for a month in the furnace room below the basement stairs of her building. The bright yellows flecked into the scarves of the ice skaters were oddly textured and she eventually decided on mixing a little sand into chrome yellow. Each passage had its own technical puzzles. The actual painting was slow and painstaking - a week on the woods, a week on the sky, two weeks on the frozen river and ice skaters. Next, she sketched with pale chalk before dead coloring with raw umber used with black.

To the naked canvas, she applied a thin coat of fresh ground but retained the surface signature of the original. She saved the old varnish as she stripped it off, squeezing the cotton swabs into a mason jar. She peeled back the antique canvas with diluted solvents, working in small circles, one inch at a time.

Ellie is transfixed by the commission and willingly suspends her disbelief of the story in order to do the work. “ At the Edge of a Wood” has been in the de Groot family for three hundred years and Ellie is told the owner has supplied her with photographs for her work because he can’t bear to part with the original. In 1957 New York, graduate student Ellie Shipley has been commissioned to paint an exact replica of the seventeenth century painting by Dutch artist Sara de Vos.

The last painting of sara devos