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.

A book of yearning.

The book transpires to be neither a grave-to-cradle nor a cradle-to-grave biography of Fabritius, but rather a lyrical contemplation of his life’s work, the culture of the Dutch Golden Age and Cumming’s memories of her father.

Cumming writes with the sureness of carefully laid paint. This is not art historical scholarship of the academic kind – there are no footnotes or references to sources beyond her own feelings and intuition. It is an emotionally informed approach to art, always paying attention to the fact that each person’s vision is different (one of her daughters goes colour-blind as she is writing this book, having stared too long at the sun). Cumming cannot in truth show us new definitive facts about Carel Fabritius, but she brings him out of the shadows, making us see why he is so much more than the missing link in someone else’s story..

Cumming articulates why we are so magnetically drawn to certain paintings, even when their painters are long gone.

Alongside the story of Fabritius and Cumming’s father, Thunderclap offers a fascinating insight into Dutch painting and broader Netherlandish society through its paintings, from housing to infrastructure, poverty and family life.

For Laura Cumming, Dutch art is a placid paradise with the countdown to a cataclysm ticking away in the background..

If this sounds as though Thunderclap is doing too many things, the author blends these elements seamlessly, in the process revealing as much about her own relationship to art as the work itself.

Cumming delivers a keen-eyed defense of Dutch painting, as a whole, which some art historians have written off as 'just transcriptions of nature,' at best, or 'just depictions of trivial stuff,' when they’re feeling spiteful. Finally, Thunderclap is a memoir, a loving and moving recounting of Cumming’s own love affair with Dutch painting and the importance it’s played in her life, most notably as a connection to her father, the Scottish painter James Cumming.

This is not a biography of Fabritius. Such a feat would be nigh impossible as he seems to glide on the edge of history. Where Cumming truly excels is in the defense of Dutch art.

A tender homage to art.