Did you know there were female Dutch Old Masters? I didn’t. But apparently there were, though they were mostly relegated to painting still lifes (lives?), which were considered appropriate subject-matter for a person of femaleness. Also, due to the usual kinds of infuriating assumptions, many of their works have, over the years, been attributed to their male contemporaries, because Of Course. So if nothing else, I can thank this book for giving me some new knowledge.
In Brooklyn, 1958, a twenty-something grad student in art history, Ellie, is hired to paint a forgery of a rare landscape by one such Old Mastress. Forty years later, she is an academic assisting in the curation of an exhibition in Sydney, when she learns that both the original and the fake are speeding their way towards her from private collections, having both, by some fluke or error, been borrowed for the show. Meanwhile, in the 1630s, the novel also follows the journey of the original artist, Sara de Vos, from expulsion from the Guild of St Luke in Amsterdam, to a country house where she is summoned to work off her absent husband’s debt. (According to the author’s note, Sara is a fictional composite of several historical figures.)
This is pretty great subject-matter, and I wanted the resulting novel to be much more than it was. I can’t honestly put it higher than Unit of Entertainment. It has moments of very-goodness early on, and generally functions well as a time filler if subject-matter is all you care about. It is, however, let down by problems on both a superficial and technical level. These include stilted and unnatural dialogue, as well as errors that should have been caught at the proof-reading stage (such as a character finishing the same glass of champagne twice in one paragraph). More fundamentally, though, as a multi-stranded plot, it doesn’t feel as though the author has a clear idea of how the structure should operate. I’m still fuzzy as to where the denouement actually lies: the entire third act is kind of a hot mess, and although it’s all resolved towards the end, the pacing is right off. It’s a shame, because what could have been a series of captivating revelations ends up being a merely mechanical winding-up, as though the plot is an insolvent corporation. The Old Mastresses deserve better.