Scottish art critic Laura Cumming's lyrical voice works perfectly with her poetic writing for this rambling story of an event that occurred in 1654 Holland. The Thunderclap, a massive explosion in a gunpowder store, killed the artist Carel Fabritius, known for his painting THE GOLDFINCH. Cumming's sometimes emotional performance weaves her personal memories of her father, an artist, with her fascination for the Dutch people who are immortalized in the many fine art masterpieces that show the details of everyday life. Her enthusiasm for her subject is apparent in her narration as she explores the impact a painting can have on the viewer's life. The memory of Fabritius, who died suddenly, lives forever through THE GOLDFINCH, which survived the explosion but bears traces of damage. J.E.S. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death
Narrated by Laura Cumming
Laura CummingUnabridged — 7 hours, 39 minutes
Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death
Narrated by Laura Cumming
Laura CummingUnabridged — 7 hours, 39 minutes
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Overview
New York Times bestselling author Laura Cumming “combines first-rate art history with deeply felt memoir” (The Washington Post) in this fascinating, little-known story of the massive explosion in Holland that killed Carel Fabritius, renowned painter of The Goldfinch and A View of Delft and nearly killed Johannes Vermeer-two of the greatest artists of the 17th century.
“Exquisite.” -Simon Schama, The Guardian
As a brilliant art critic and historian, Laura Cumming has explored the importance of art in life and can give us a perspective on the time and place in which the artist worked. Now, through the lens of one dramatic event in 17th-century Holland, Cumming “has fashioned a book that combines memoir, art criticism, and history to illuminating effect” (The New York Times Book Review).
In 1654, the Thunderclap-an enormous explosion at a gunpowder store-devasted the city of Delft, killing hundreds of people, including the extraordinary painter Carel Fabritius, and injuring thousands more.
Framing the story around the life of Fabritius, Cumming illuminates this extraordinary moment in art history while also writing about her own father, a painter. Like Dutch art, the story gradually links country, city, town, street, house, interior-all the way to the bird on its perch, the blue and white tile, the smallest seed in a loaf of bread. The impact of a painting and how it can enter our thoughts, influence our view and understanding of the world is the heart of this book. Cumming has brought her unique eye to her most compelling subject yet.
Featuring beautiful full-color images of Dutch paintings throughout, this is “a glorious tribute to the two men who showed her the truth of the notion that paintings offer `a land in themselves, a society, a place to be'” (The Economist).
Editorial Reviews
05/29/2023
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. (July)
Praise for Thunderclap
“If you haven’t yet read Thunderclap by Laura Cumming—a brilliant exploration of Carl Fabritius, Vermeer and survival and loss—rush out and buy it. By far the best book on art of the Netherlands that I’ve read.” —Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes and Letters to Camondo
“Wonderous...with Cumming’s Proust-like meditations on time never to be recovered and art never to be produced, its thunderclap still echoes in my ears.” —Wall Street Journal
“Genre-defying . . . By weaving together vivid evocations of ones that move her with brief biographies of the men and women who painted them, she invites us to share that love. Like all good elegists, Cumming brings the dead to life in the very act of mourning them.” —New York Times Book Review
“An offering for the love hours of art. Here lies a crucial distinction: where Benjamin Moser is a native of the written world, Laura Cumming is amphibious, gliding with cool elegance into the painted realm and returning to conjure up its delights for us in prose.” —The Times Literary Supplement
“Thunderclap is a glorious tribute to the two men who showed her the truth of the notion that paintings offer ‘a land in themselves, a society, a place to be.’” —The Economist
“Cumming writes with the sureness of carefully laid paint. This is not art historical scholarship of the academic kind. It is an emotionally informed approach to art... She brings Carel Fabritius out of the shadows, making us see why he is so much more than the missing link in someone else’s story.” —The Guardian
“Thunderclap combines first-rate art history with deeply felt memoir . . . A defiant aesthete, Cumming’s gentle, meditative prose is itself an evocation of the hushed world of the art she loves.” —The Washington Post
“A lustrous meditation on the lives and after-lives of artists...with a novelist’s pace, a critic’s eye, a daughter’s heart.” —Financial Times *Best Summer Books of 2023*
[With] spellbinding storytelling, Thunderclap is as deftly told as any thriller. It is also an astonishingly rich book about the glories that are revealed to us when we look at great paintings with careful attention, and an open heart…how a work of art can suddenly open our eyes in a thunderclap of clarity.”
You are never going to read a better book about the experience of art—and of love.”
Sumptuous, impressively erudite…a gleaming work of someone at the peak of her craft."
Scottish art critic Laura Cumming's lyrical voice works perfectly with her poetic writing for this rambling story of an event that occurred in 1654 Holland. The Thunderclap, a massive explosion in a gunpowder store, killed the artist Carel Fabritius, known for his painting THE GOLDFINCH. Cumming's sometimes emotional performance weaves her personal memories of her father, an artist, with her fascination for the Dutch people who are immortalized in the many fine art masterpieces that show the details of everyday life. Her enthusiasm for her subject is apparent in her narration as she explores the impact a painting can have on the viewer's life. The memory of Fabritius, who died suddenly, lives forever through THE GOLDFINCH, which survived the explosion but bears traces of damage. J.E.S. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
★ 2023-04-18
A tender homage to art.
Scottish art critic Cumming, the author of The Vanishing Velázquez, 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.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940177992525 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 07/11/2023 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
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