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Top of the pile
84
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
71/100Critics
96/100Scholars
Author:
Laura Cumming
Publisher:
Scribner
Date:
July 11, 2023
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 illuminates one of the most celebrated periods in art history.
What The Reviewers Say
Part homage to her father and part critical study of Dutch painting, Cumming’s genre-spanning book is first and foremost a biography. Its elegiac meanderings return time and time again to the figure of Carel Fabritius.
Genre-defying.
In one brief essay-like chapter after another, the author recounts her own adventures in art, weaving together vignettes and memories of her father, anecdotes about her career as an art critic, and observations and analyses of the lives and works of 17th-century Dutch artists.
Cumming...draws us into another mystery that fascinates her: that of the brief life of the genius Fabritius, the painter of The Goldfinch, the chained bird that stares back at us from its prison of a perch.
