norma clarke
Blast from the Past Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art & Life & Sudden Death
By Laura Cumming (Chatto & Windus 272pp £25)
art
Small wonder: ‘A View of Delft’ by Carel Fabritius, 1652
As a teenager with an interest in art, growing up on London’s Old Kent Road with a father whose mantra was ‘God gave you legs to walk’ (he didn’t believe in God but he did believe in walking), I often found myself on Sunday afternoons walk- ing to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. I remember distinctly the day I discovered the Dutch painters. It wasn’t Rembrandt or Vermeer who caught my eye, but Hendrick Avercamp and, espe- cially, Pieter de Hooch. I was startled that a simple painting of a backyard with red- brick and white-plastered walls, an outside tap and a broom could be so compelling. I don’t remember noticing the little view of Delft by Carel Fabritius that meant so much to Laura Cumming, or Fabritius’s self-portrait in a fur hat that hangs in the corner of a room full of Rembrandts. Fab- ritius is perhaps best known now for his even smaller painting The Goldfinch (in the Mauritshuis in The Hague).
‘We see pictures in time and place … They are fragments of our lives, moments of existence that may be as unremarkable as rain or as startling as a clap of thunder,’ Cumming writes. A love of Dutch art and a passion for looking at pictures were bequeathed to Cumming by her artist parents. She wrote about her mother’s fragmented, mysterious early life in On Chapel Sands (2019). In Thunderclap it is Laura’s father, James Cumming, who takes centre stage, and like On Chapel Sands the book is infused with love – of parents, childhood, pictures and words. It is at once deeply personal and inclusive, because it is about the shared experience of looking at pictures and the shared desire to know and understand what these ‘moments of existence’ mean. I liked reading Thunderclap so much that I immediatel y reread On Chapel Sands. Together, these books are a remarkable experiment in form as well as a richly satisfying extended meditation on art, life and death.
The thunderclap of the title is both actual and metaphorical. In October 1654, there was a massive gunpowder explosion, so loud it could be heard more than seventy miles away, that destroyed the centre of Delft. Fabritius, who had studied with Rembrandt and some of whose paintings hung in Vermeer’s house nearby, was painting a portrait in his studio when the explosion happened. The roof beams collapsed; everybody died. He was thirty-
two. His death was ‘complete chance: the fatal coincidence of time and place’. The gunpowder had been stored in the arsenal and accident or human error set it off. Cumming compares it to the explosion in Beirut in 2020.
Little is known of Fabritius’s life. He seems to exist ‘below the level of common knowledge’. Born in Middenbeemster in February 1622, he had many younger siblings, including two brothers who became painters. Cumming probes the sparse information, asking what pictures they can have seen and noting that Dutch people were zealous buyers of Dutch art. English travellers were astonished to see paintings for sale in markets. Brewers, bakers and carpenters furnished their walls with paintings. (Look at Dutch interiors – there’s almost always a painting.) Fabritius ‘married the girl next door’, but within a few years his wife and three babies were dead. In his first self-portrait you see ‘the eyes of a man who has suffered all this, who lives with the burden of such sorrow’.
Just as her father took issue with what she was taught at school – that ‘Golden Age Dutch art was all about things ’ because ‘the Dutch just loved stuff ’ – so july 2023 | Literary Review 9