Fictionalizing Biography
4. An Interview with Dominic Smith , Author of The Last Painting of Sara de
Vos: Capturing the Seventeenth Century
Frima Fox Hofrichter
Abstract
Dominic Smith created a vivid picture of a woman artist, her life and times, in seventeenth-century Holland, in his much-praised historical novel The Last Painting of Sara de Vos. Interviewed by Frima Fox Hofrichter, a consultant for Smith, and an expert on an actual seventeenth-century Dutch woman artist, Judith Leyster, Smith discusses his method and research. His storyline has three avenues: the seventeenth-century artist and her milieu, the art historian who specializes on that woman artist, and a twenty-first-century collector. Knitted within are their personal lives – and the question of forgery. Smith and Hofrichter discuss his inspiration for the novel in Judith Leyster and how his contacts and travel influenced the novel’s authentic flavor.
Keywords: seventeenth-century women artists, the Golden Age, Dominic Smith, historical fiction, Judith Leyster, forgery
The subject of this interview, Dominic Smith, is the author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos and other novels, most recently The Electric Hotel.
He was interviewed by Frima Fox Hofrichter, author of Judith Leyster, A Woman Painter in Holland’s Golden Age and articles on Leyster and other women artists of the seventeenth century. Hofrichter was a consultant to Smith on his novel.
The interview took place over several days in March 2020.
Fitzmaurice, J., N.J. Miller, S.J. Steen (eds.), Authorizing Early Modern European Women. From Biography to Biofiction. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022
doi 10.5117/9789463727143_ch04
FFH: Dominic, it’s a pleasure to interview you.
I think most readers have been struck by the authentic nature of the time and place you provided for your characters, who each seem vividly believable.
My questions are to explore how you did this.
So . . .
You have written several novels of historical fiction, but they are set in the nineteenth or twentieth century in France, America, and even the South Seas. But none involves art, painting, or art history.
What drew you to this subject?
DS: I’m often drawn to visual culture in my work. The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre reimagines the life and work of the inventor of modern photography (the daguerreotype), The Electric Hotel explores the vanishing medium of silent film, and Bright and Distant Shores looks at the phenom-enon of nineteenth-century museum collecting voyages. So, in a way, the world of painting, art history, and the Golden Age is an extension of this fascination with visual / physical art forms. But more specifically, with The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, I became intrigued by the fact that we know so little about the women painters of the Golden Age. Judith Leyster was of particular interest, especially given that her work was falsely attributed to Frans Hals for so long after her death. I’m drawn to these kinds of gaps and silences in history.
FFH: You have two main female protagonists – Sara de Vos, the seventeenth-century painter, and Ellie Shipley, the twenty- / twenty-first-seventeenth-century art historian.
What is your real relationship with artists, art historians, and the art world in general?
DS: Before writing this book, my exposure to the art world was mainly through visits to museums. But the more I started to work with this ma-terial, the more I felt that I needed to probe the methods and materials and mindsets of artists, art historians, and restoration experts. To better understand the life of women artists in seventeenth-century Holland, I was lucky enough to find you, Frima, as an expert willing to be interviewed.
Similarly, I interviewed Stephen Gritt, who at the time was the head of restoration for the National Gallery of Canada. To better understand paint-ers, I mostly read books on painting technique and biographies of famous painters through time. I also read extensively about the world of collectors and art auctions.
An intErViEW With doMinic sMith 51
FFH: Why did you set your story 400 years ago – in the seventeenth century?
And in The Netherlands?
DS: I wanted to show the history of a single painting through time, and the Golden Age, especially in Holland, has always been of interest to me. I love the atmosphere in Dutch seventeenth-century paintings, whether it’s an Avercamp ice scene or a genre scene in a tavern or a landscape or floral still life.
I also knew I wanted a connection between a modern-day art historian and a woman painter of a previous century. Then I discovered the story of these women, like Judith Leyster, who had been members of the Guild of St. Luke, the main painters’ guild, and that very little of their work has survived. So the idea of an art historian who has devoted her career to one of these “lost”
women painters emerged. These threads came together when I invented the painting “At the Edge of a Wood” that was painted during a period of grief in the seventeenth century, and that has been in one wealthy family for hundreds of years. Fiction writing is often a set of associations that build over time. One choice results in many doors opening and others closing.
FFH: Have you been to The Netherlands?
DS: I lived for a year in Amsterdam in 1999/2000 and became enthralled with Dutch culture and art. I have fond memories of spending afternoons in the Rijksmuseum and discovering hidden, medieval courtyards around the city center.
FFH: Actually, The Netherlands – Haarlem and Amsterdam – are the key settings for only one of the protagonists, Sara, but Ellie lives in Brooklyn and then there are events in Australia.
What is your relationship to or experience with these other places?
DS: I grew up in Australia to an American father and Australian mother. I’ve lived in the US, more or less, since 1989. I have friends who live in Brooklyn and have always felt like it was a place I wanted to explore in my fiction. It has such a rich history; I also needed a place for Ellie to live in the late 1950s that was decidedly unglamorous. I wanted a place where she could be seen as living “on the margins” of the art and academic worlds.
FFH: The forgery of Sara’s seventeenth-century painting is an important part of the story. How did you learn about pigments and the technical side of painting?
DS: Stephen Gritt was the one that taught me about lead-tin yellow, this fascinating yellow of the Golden Age that disappeared for a long time. I learned the technical side of painting all from books and archival resources – textbooks on painting technique but also memoirs and reflections about the lives and works of artists.
FFH: Who taught you how to paint a forgery?!!
DS: One of the stranger moments in writing the book was reaching out to Ken Perenyi, a known forger who’d written a fascinating memoir about his exploits (Caveat Emptor). I fashioned some of the forgery methods used by Ellie in the novel on Ken’s approach. I emailed him a list of the things Ellie does to the forgery and asked if he would be willing to “authenticate” my methods. To my surprise, he wrote back and validated the forgery techniques.
Apart from books and looking at known forgeries in museums and galleries, that was my first contact with this world. Only a novelist could have an email exchange about the authentication of a forgery of a fictional painting!
FFH: Wow! That in itself is a great story!
Much of the seventeenth-century story is similar to the real-life story of Judith Leyster (1609–1660). Did you model Sara after her or other early modern women artists?
DS: Sara is absolutely modeled on some of what we know about Judith Leyster’s life, and your own book on Leyster was an essential resource for developing that understanding. Sara van Baalbergen, who may have been the very first woman to be admitted to a painters’ guild in Holland (and whose work has not survived) was Sara’s namesake. In a lot of ways, Sara de Vos is a fusion of historical elements, inventions, and biographies.
FFH: Is there a particular painting by Judith Leyster that inspired you?
DS: Leyster’s Self-Portrait (Fig. 4.1) is so powerful, I think, the way it feels like we’ve wandered into her studio one afternoon and she’s turned to take us in with this warm gaze. That was an early image that galvanized the novel, and it is alluded to at the end of the book. I remember standing in front of Leyster’s self-portrait at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and marveling at the idea that this was her masterpiece, the painting she probably submitted to join the Guild of St. Luke. It was a moment of reaching back through history, and that time felt very immediate.
An intErViEW With doMinic sMith 53
FFH: And it is that sense of immediacy that shows through your writing and the characters you created.
FFH: The inability to have children comes up with two of the women. And the third woman, Ellie, doesn’t have any children either. Why?
DS: The book explores “barrenness” on some level, both in terms of having children but also in terms of creative expression. Ellie is a character who has given all of her life to her work and she’s never quite felt drawn to the idea of having a child, especially given her ambivalence about her own
Figure 4.1. Judith leyster, Self-Portrait, c. 1633. national gallery of Art, Washington, d.c., gift of Mr.
and Mrs. robert Woods Bliss.
childhood. (She’s also someone who turned her back on her own painting and creativity.) Marty and Rachel desperately want to have a child but have been unable; this feels a bit like a wound between them. Sara de Vos, of course, loses a child, and it’s her grief that adorns the wall above Marty and Rachel’s bed. I wanted to explore the different ways children – wanting them, having them, losing them – shape these different sets of characters.
FFH: Would children of any of these women have somehow distracted from the narrative of your story?
DS: I don’t think it’s a question of whether it would have distracted from the narrative. In fact, the childlessness is a central part of the narrative, and it’s woven throughout the book thematically. With a child, even a grown one, Ellie might not have returned to live in exile on an island in Australia in 2000. With children, Marty and Rachel might not have had their particular malaise. And, of course, losing a child for Sara de Vos is the domino that falls and begins the entire book. The idea of children haunts these characters on some level.
FFH: I think you painted (sorry for the pun) a difficult life for anyone in the seventeenth century. How did you learn about it? What did you read or what sources did you use?
DS: I read a lot of histories about the seventeenth century in The Nether-lands, but the most useful one was Daily Life in Rembrandt’s Holland by Paul Zumthor. A lot of what I’m after in my research is the nouns – what did people eat, what did they wear, how did they get around? History books often gloss over such things, so you need either primary sources or books that focus on the stuff of everyday life.
FFH: I know that you have taught writing to both college undergraduate and graduate students. Did you involve them in any way while you were writing this?
DS: For the past decade, I’ve taught in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, in Swannanoa, North Carolina, a low-residency program where students and faculty come together twice a year for a ten-day residency.
I like this program a lot because it’s about supporting aspiring writers in this lifelong apprenticeship. That said, it’s very different from meeting with students in a classroom, where the conversation can be a little more
An intErViEW With doMinic sMith 55
free-ranging. I’ve also taught undergraduates at Rice University, Southern Methodist University, and the University of Texas at Austin. In those more traditional settings, I have often given students writing prompts related to a piece of art or history, though not during the time that I was writing this book.
FFH: I think this is a common question to writers of fiction, but do you personally know anyone like the people in your book?
DS: Not really, but there are always elements of people the writer knows in the work. For example, my late father was fascinated by real estate and always looked in realtor windows no matter where he was in the world. That’s a habit I gave to the older Marty de Groot. These are the ways that people I know are likely to be reflected in characters who are largely invented.
Small habits of mind or speech or action.
FFH: Thank you so much, Dominic, for this interview and for allowing us through your novel to enter the lives of these characters and for capturing the seventeenth century so vividly.
DS: Frima, thank you so much for your interest in my work, and for your time and contributions during the writing of my novel!
Works Cited
Hofrichter, Frima Fox. Judith Leyster, A Woman Painter in Hollands’s Golden Age.
Doornspijk, NL: Davaco Publishers, 1989.
Perenyi, Ken. Caveat Emptor, The Secret Life of an American Forger. New York:
Pegasus Books, 2012.
Smith, Dominic. The Last Painting of Sara de Vos. New York: Sara Crichton Books / Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2016.
Zumthor, Paul. Daily Life in Rembrandt’s Holland, translated by Simon Watson Taylor. New York: Macmillan, 1963.
About the interviewer and novelist
Frima Fox Hofrichter is a feminist art historian and Professor at Pratt Institute. She has written on women artists, and authored the catalogue raisonné on Judith Leyster and the Baroque and Rococo sections of Janson’s History of Art and Gender and Art of the 17th Century for Oxford Bibliographies.
Dominic Smith grew up in Sydney, Australia and now lives in Seattle, Washington. He is the author of five novels, including The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, which was a New York Times Bestseller and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.