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‘So familiar and yet so unfathomable’
If 17th-century Dutch art is your thing this must be your book, believes MICHAL BONCZA
ENIGMATIC: Carel Fabritius’ View of Delft, with a Musical Instrument Seller’s Stall [Kotomi_/CC]

Thunderclap: A memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death
by Laura Cummings
Chatto and Windus £12.99

THE thunderclap of the title was a gunpowder explosion on October 12 1654, which devastated the city of Delft killing over a hundred and leaving thousands injured. Among the dead was Carel Fabritius, Rembrandt van Rijn’s most promising apprentice.

Fabritius holds a special fascination for Laura Cummings as does his View of Delft, with a Musical Instrument Seller’s Stall, painted two years before his death (at the National Gallery, London): “for pictures can shore you up, remind you of who you are and what you stand for.”

KEEPING HIS DISTANCE: Carel Fabritius, c1645 - note the eyes, rather unusually for portraits, are level with the halfway line
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