Amsterdam, 1631: Sara de Vos becomes the first woman to be admitted as a
master painter to the city's Guild of St. Luke. Though women do not
paint landscapes (they are generally restricted to indoor subjects), a
wintry outdoor scene haunts Sara: She cannot shake the image of a young
girl from a nearby village, standing alone beside a silver birch at
dusk, staring out at a group of skaters on the frozen river below.
Defying the expectations of her time, she decides to paint it.
New York City, 1957: The only known surviving work of Sara de Vos, At
the Edge of a Wood, hangs in the bedroom of a wealthy Manhattan lawyer,
Marty de Groot, a descendant of the original owner. It is a beautiful
but comfortless landscape. The lawyer's marriage is prominent but
comfortless, too. When a struggling art history grad student, Ellie
Shipley, agrees to forge the painting for a dubious art dealer, she
finds herself entangled with its owner in ways no one could predict.
Sydney, 2000: Now a celebrated art historian and curator, Ellie Shipley
is mounting an exhibition in her field of specialization: female
painters of the Dutch Golden Age. When it becomes apparent that both the
original At the Edge of a Wood and her forgery are en route to her
museum, the life she has carefully constructed threatens to unravel
entirely and irrevocably.
