THUNDERCLAP

A tender homage to art.

Scottish art critic Cumming, the author of The Vanishing Velázquez, melds memoir, art history, and biography in an elegant, beautifully illustrated meditation on art, desire, imagination, and memory. Central to her narrative are two artists: her beloved father, James Cumming (1922-1991), self-described as a painter of “semi-figurative art,” and Carel Fabritius (1622-1654), one of some 600 to 700 painters working in Holland during what has been called the Golden Age of Dutch art. A contemporary of Rembrandt, with whom he studied, and Vermeer, Fabritius was killed in a devastating explosion of gunpowder stores—a great thunderclap—that leveled his studio and nearly killed his neighbor Vermeer as well. Unlike his more famous contemporaries, Fabritius is survived by scant biographical information and barely a dozen paintings, of which two—A View of Delft and The Goldfinch—are the most well known. From shards of evidence, Cumming has created a nuanced portrait of an enigmatic artist whose works have profoundly affected her. A View of Delft, she writes, “is like a seer’s dream, a vision materialising as if through an adder stone, floating in mind and memory.” The Goldfinch, a single bird held captive by a chain, speaks to her of the “isolation and withdrawal” that she imagines characterized Fabritius himself, a man who had buried his wife and children and who faced indebtedness and loneliness. “This bird,” she writes, “has a specific force of personality, an air of solitude and sorrow, a living being looking out at another living being from its prison against the wall.” Cumming recalls the paintings she saw as a child growing up in Edinburgh, the richness of the works that she saw on a family visit to the Netherlands, and her careful observations of her father, engrossed in the work that, for her, keeps him alive. “The painter dies,” she writes, “though I still cannot believe it. He dies, but his painting survives.”

Moving reflections rendered in precise, radiant prose.