Thunderclap

May 29, 2023
Art critic Cumming (The Vanishing Man) examines how art has enriched both her own life and others’ in this vivid history of the golden age of Dutch painting and its rupture by the 1654 explosion at a Delft gunpowder storehouse that leveled much of the city and killed hundreds. Among the casualties was Carel Fabritius (1622–1654), an apprentice to Rembrandt whose best-known paintings are The Goldfinch and A View of Delft. As Cumming, who counts Fabritius as one of her favorite artists, recreates what she can of his life and work and surveys other Dutch masters she admires—Rembrandt, Ter Borch, De Hooch, Ruisdael, Van Goyen—she seamlessly intertwines memories of her Scottish childhood and her artist father, James Cumming (1922–1991), whom she credits with teaching her how to look and see. In this elegant and luminous work, Cumming writes with deep feeling and knowledge about how “pictures can shore you up, remind you who you are and what you stand for.” Art lovers will be enthralled.

Starred review from July 1, 2023
A thunderclap can be a bone-shaking crash of thunder or any loud, concussive event. It can also be a startling and resounding personal revelation. Art critic Cumming, a writer of exceptional acuity, responsiveness, and poetic grace, investigates both in this many-faceted inquiry. Having told her mother's arresting story in Five Days Gone (2019), Cumming now portrays her father, a Scottish artist, within a resplendent celebration of Dutch painting. A key creation for Cumming is The View of Delft, painted by the elusive Carel Fabritius, best known for his provocative The Goldfinch. One certain fact about the artist is that he was fatally injured in 1654 at age 32 when an underground gunpowder arsenal exploded in Delft with terrible force. As Cumming gleans what she can about Fabritius and his short, difficult life from the scant historical record and his few surviving, subtly unnerving paintings, she also explicates Holland's ardor for paintings that seemingly depict daily life yet actually ponder profound mysteries of existence. She touches on the lives of other renowned Delft painters, including Rembrandt and Vermeer, and brings forward wrongfully neglected Dutch artists, including witty and prolific Rachel Ruysch. With stellar reproductions accompanying Cumming's vibrant memories and deep musings, this is an incisive and eye-opening, fascinating and amusing, loving and grateful chronicle.

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Starred review from May 15, 2023
A tender homage to art. Scottish art critic Cumming, the author of The Vanishing Vel�zquez, 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.

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