The story stretches across time and place from seventeenth-century Amsterdam to Sydney in the year 2000, via the teeming, layered New York of the 1950s. Sara de Vos is a painter like her husband, but after a cluster of family misfortunes he abandons her; she is left to her own devices, but from the greatest tragedy of her life there grows an astonishing painting.

More than 200 years later, a young Australian student of art history called Ellie Shipley is struggling to make a living in her squalid Brooklyn apartment after a stint at London's Courtauld Institute has left her disheartened by the way that 'the plum museum jobs always seemed to go to older, male graduates'. Knowing herself to be exceptionally talented in the field of art restoration, she receives and accepts a commission to make a copy of an obscure seventeenth-century painting called At the Edge of a Wood, which she has never seen before. She knows she is being employed to produce a forgery, but she represses that knowledge and focuses on her own delight in the task.

Not long afterwards, in a much richer and cooler part of New York City, a wealthy lawyer called Marty de Groot realises that the strange and beautiful painting that has been in his Dutch family for more than three centuries has been stolen and replaced by a fake. An imaginative and determined man of means, he employs a private detective to find out what has happened, and the lives of Ellie and Marty eventually, inevitably, intersect.

Carousing Couple, 1630, oil on panel by Judith Leyster, pioneering female painter of the Dutch Golden Age (The Yorck Project: 10,000 Meisterwerke der Malere, Wikimedia Commons)This novel has been likened to Tracy Chevalier's Girl With a Pearl Earring (1999) and Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch (2013), but those are superficial comparisons based on similarities of subject matter. Smith's novel is more stylistically original and more psychologically complex than either, and it entertains more abstract themes. In its fascination with the specificity of historical art materials and technique, in the questions it raises about identity, forgery, and authenticity, and in its exploration of the relationship between art and lived experience, it recalls – and bears comparison with – Robertson Davies' What's Bred in the Bone (1985), arguably the best novel Davies ever wrote. And in the slightly spooky relationship that's implied between characters separated by 300 years, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos recalls A.S. Byatt's nineteenth-century poets and twentieth-century scholars in Possession (1990). Late in life, Ellie thinks about the reasons for that brilliantly executed deception of her youth:

The truer statement was that she'd used the de Vos canvas as a testing ground for her own thwarted talents, that she was reckless and lonely and angry with the world, that she craved a kind of communion, to find a layer beneath the glazes and scumbles and lead white where Sara herself still trudged through the fog of antique varnish ...

Dominic Smith (photograph by Stacy Sodolak)The details about painting materials are a symptom of the only thing about this book that doesn't quite work. Smith goes into considerable technical detail about these materials, and so, of necessity, this and several other aspects of his subject matter are heavily researched. Every now and then this interferes with the pace of the story, the strength of the characterisation, and the reader's suspended disbelief. It is all too easy for a writer to be entranced by new-found, hard-won, fascinating knowledge, but the incorporation of that knowledge into fiction is not always a success.

For the rest, however, this beautiful novel is a gift. Even the most minor walk-on characters are brought to life in a few strokes; the three main characters are all vivid and intriguing, and Marty de Groot in particular is a masterpiece of characterisation. The sense of place is intensely felt and evoked; the writing is clear and precise, never lapsing into carelessness or cliché. Sophisticated yet deeply felt, somehow both hefty and delicate, this book is a seductive, rewarding read.