Thunderclap: From the Sunday Times bestselling author of On Chapel Sands

Laura Cumming

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LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WRITERS’ PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024

‘A wonderful read (or a great present) for anyone who loves stories and art’ Nina Stibbe, author of Love, Nina

A beautifully illustrated new memoir of a life in art, a father and daughter, and what a shared love of a painting can come to mean.

‘We see with everything that we are’

On the morning of 12 October 1654, a gunpowder explosion devastated the Dutch city of Delft. The thunderclap was heard over seventy miles away. Among the fatalities was the painter Carel Fabritius, dead at thirty-two, leaving only his haunting masterpiece The Goldfinch and barely a dozen known paintings. The explosion that killed him also buried his reputation, along with answers to the mysteries of his life and career.

What happened to Fabritius before and after this disaster is just one of the discoveries in a book that explores the relationship between art and life, interweaving the lives of Laura Cumming, her Scottish painter father, who also died too young, and the great artists of the Dutch Golden Age.

This is a book about what a picture may come to mean: how it can enter your life and change your thinking in a thunderclap.

A SUNDAY TIMES, DAILY EXPRESS AND GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

‘Brilliant … rush out and buy it’ Edmund de Waal, bestselling author of The Hare with Amber Eyes