Thunderclap

Lately I've been drawn to books about art. Not so much art history, but the experience of art, which is decidedly personal. And yet, when put into words by a gifted writer like Cumming, the reader can relate. Because we too have likely felt it, the silence and the stillness as we put our eyes and brain to work, looking (really looking) at a work of art.

Cumming's focus in this book is Carel Fabritius, the Dutch painter best known for his haunting masterpiece The Goldfinch. Fabritius died much too early, at the age of 32, in the Delft Thunderclap - a gunpowder explosion that devastated the Dutch town on 12 October 1654. Art historians generally connect Fabritius to Rembrandt in whose studio he worked briefly, and to Vermeer who was his younger neighbour in Delft. But compared to these two, he remains a mystery. Barely a dozen of his works have survived, and yet one can see how singular he was as an artist. The book begins with his 'A View of Delft' and the author's obsession with this painting, and ends with a poignant revelation about The Goldfinch. And in between, Laura Cumming weaves in much more. She writes about her father James Cumming, also a painter, whose life and art she describes with love and sadness (she lost him when he was in his sixties); about the great artists of the Dutch Golden Age; about the precariousness of our daily existence.

The narrative, as it winds through these various themes, keeps finding its way gently back to Fabritius, whose life ended so suddenly in the Delft explosion, and to the questions that remain about his short life and his work, the few paintings that survived and the ones forever lost.

"We see pictures in time and place. We cannot see them otherwise. They are fragments of our lives, moments of existence that may be as unremarkable as rain or as startling as a clap of thunder. Whatever we are that day, whatever is going on behind our eyes, or in the forest of our lives, is present in what we see. We see with everything that we are."