Carel Fabritius, beyond The Goldfinch
On paintings that hold viewers spellbound, and an author who writes about them like no other.
Like many others, I suspect, I have been enchanted by a painting that lives in the National Gallery-Portrait of a Young Man by Andrea del Sarto.
Although I don’t live in London, I pay the painting regular visits, usually immediately before or after visiting the gallery's current temporary exhibition. Last time, though, after going through the old same routine-catching the Pesellino exhibition and calling in on Andrea del Sarto- I sauntered into a less crowded room. Moving closer to one of its corners (the painting’s diminutive size, about 15 x 30 cm, pulled me closer) I caught sight of A View of Delft, an oil on canvas, signed and dated-C. FABRITIVS 1652.
I felt as if I had just met an old friend and smiled: this was the painting under whose spell art critic Laura Cumming had fell shortly after moving to London.
Carel Fabritius (1622-1654), A View of Delft, with a Musical Instrument Seller's Stall, 1652. © National Gallery, London
Taking this painting as a starting point, in her latest book Thunderclap: A memoir of art and life & sudden death Cumming has retraced the biography and artistic career of Carel Fabritius (who didn’t paint only The Goldfinch) and her father, the Scottish artist James Cumming.
I have to admit that, first time round, I had abandoned the book halfway through. But that was only for reasons of pure guilt-one of those rare occasions when a deadline is looming and I positevely have to get something done. Anyway, as soon as I registered what I was looking at, I resolved to pick the book up again. After all, what are the chances of coming across such a small painting in such an extensive collection?
Reading Laura Cumming is like having a conversation with an intelligent friend who, not only shares the same love for art and history of art, but is generous in discussing her observations on seeing and experiencing art. In short, the kind of friend I can count on one hand.
A Face to the World: On Self-portraits, originally published in 2009, is the first book I read by this author. Because it remains one of my old-favourite from which I like re-reading a couple of passages whenever I need to focus, I keep it handy. I absolutely love her precise and poetic prose, the way she intertwines art and life experiences.
Thunderclap triumphally combines history of art with memoir. Delving into the life and work of Carel Fabritius offers Cumming the opportunity to reflect on her father’s life too. Particularly in the second part of the book the Dutch painter’s story of struggles and poverty and debts is weaved together with that of James Cumming. But there are also reminiscences of the author’s childhood, specifically of postcards given to her by the family doctor, a book of self-portraits featuring black and white plates, and a family trip to the Netherlands.
Family members’ experiences offer the chance to reflect on the act of looking and the sense of sight. Transitions are never awkward. And so we move from the daughter’s thoughts on the act of seeing to the poor eyesight of Dr Johnson (the author of the Dictionary of the English Language) and the characteristic squint Sir Joshua Reynolds gave him in the portrait now in the collection of the Tate Britain.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Reynolds set off on a tour of the Low Countries to study Flemish and Dutch paintings. Cumming embarked on a similar journey to the villages of the Beemster Polder, located north of Amsterdam, on Carel Fabritius’s trail.
Carel Fabritius, The Sentry, 1654. © Staatliches Museum Schwerin
Carel Fabritius proves to be a fascinating, yet difficult, subject to investigate. In spite of all the gaps, some quite significant, in our knowledge of both the Dutch artist’s biography and oeuvre, Fabritius is often regarded as the missing link between Rembrandt (of whom he was a pupil) and Vermeer (who owned three of his paintings). And yet, as Cumming points out, too many things still don’t add up.
Having left behind barely a dozen works, Fabritius appears to have been an outsider, like the musical instruments seller in the London painting. Regardless of all the theories advanced, the subjects of his paintings remain just as enigmatic as the artist himself. With the only undeniable evidence being his uniqueness, Cumming makes excursus on the work of other Dutch artists, such as Rembrandt, Ruisdael, and Avercamp, which aptly (and attractively) illustrate this point.
Carel Fabritius, A View of Delft, with a Musical Instrument Seller's Stall (detail), 1652. © National Gallery, London
Incidentally, I didn’t grow up with art. I didn’t have an artist or art teacher in my family. What is more, because my parents were not particularly interested in art, when a child I have never been taken by hand to visit art galleries and museums. So, whenever I am asked what made me become an art historian, I think of the considerable amount of time I used to spend staring at pictures in every book that came my way-more specifically a couple of winter landscapes by Bruegel in my primary school books.
It is easy to imagine how, besides the unfamiliar colours of nature, all those activities on the ice and snow would captivate a child growing up along the dazzling southern coast of Italy!
Digressing, now that I know what happened to the painter De Vitte’s body (trapped in the ice, it resurfaced one month later with the late winter thaw) I may look at those Dutch Little Ice Age winter wonderlands differently.
When Fabritius moved to Delft, Emanuel de Vitte used to live in the street along which we see the music man sitting in the shade. Although de Vitte is often remembered as the painter of the dogs in church (at least, this is the moniker my fellow students and I gave him) the protagonist of his religious interiors is the light. Speaking of which, it has been such a pleasure to find in the book the reproduction of a painting that, when I saw it for the first time in the Ashmolean Museum, I had considered modern because of its lighting-Still Life of Asparagus by Adriaen Coorte.
Adriaen Coorte (1665-1707), Still Life of Asparagus, 1699. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
From the silent thunder of this outstanding Dutch work the author takes us to the Delft Thunderclap, the infamous explosion of the gunpowder magazine in 1654 which killed Carel Fabritius, and then the “pure silence” of Vermeer’s The Little Street.
Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), The Little Street, ca. 1658. © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Cumming’s insights on this mysterious painting is an undeniable tour de force. In order to explain what makes it such a mesmerising one, she lists the things that cannot be held responsible-the activities of the women, the clouds, the cobbles, the bricks. Pointless would also be trying to identify the street because, despite all its realistic appearance, it is likey the painting depicts a place where to retreat to calm the mind.
Accordingly, during all the stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the author kept close at hand a postcard of this painting. I had Michael Levey’s Giovanbattista Tiepolo: His Life and Art because, in my case, a postcard wouldn’t have been enough.
Carel Fabritius, A Young Man in a Fur Cap and a Cuirass (probably a Self Portrait), 1654. © National Gallery, London
Like Cumming, whenever I look at a portrait, I do not think that the person depicted has died. Fabritius was thirty-two when he painted A Young Man in a Fur Cap. Cummings, who was the same age when she wrote about it for the first time, reflects “He and I remain the same age whenever we meet.” The young man portrayed by Andrea del Sarto doesn’t age either, and I have only to look at him to be transported back in time to a dark classroom in Via degli Alfani in Florence.
