Laura Cumming - Thunderclap

 Laura Cumming, Thunderclap (Chatto & Windus)

What were the chances on Sunday that I'd take the best book I'll read this year to the best event I attended. Well, it's roughly the number of books I'll read this year to one since I'd usually take the book I'm reading with me. Something of a coincidence, it might appear, but since it's probably never happened before and might not again, it's still a distinct statistical likelihood that it would happen one day. Or perhaps I'm just particularly receptive at present, likely to adore whatever music I hear and any book I pick up to read. But, no, a book about Carel Fabritius and C17th Dutch art is always going to be a good thing and when it's written by Laura Cumming it becomes a certainty.

Vermeer is credited with 35 extant paintings, which isn't many but it's a lot more than the dozen we have of Fabritius. Details of both their lives are few and precious and those documents and references that shed any light on them leave room for a biographer to fill in their own story. By far the best-known thing about Fabritius, though, is the explosion in the gunpowder store in Delft that killed him, aged 32, and was heard 70 miles away. The poignant end of Laura's book relates how traces of the blast were found in the canvas of The Goldfinch when it was cleaned 'with infinite care, millimetre by millimetre' some years ago,

the painting bears the traces of a blast, the miniscule indentations of hurtling matter.

'The Goldfinch' was still wet, still drying, a work in progress like its maker, a living thing in the studio when Fabritius was dying.

 

Filling out the book, but by no means only as filler, is a survey of Dutch artists of the period and a memoir of Laura's father, the painter James Cumming (1922-1991). As well as Vermeer, there are lines on Rembrandt, Pieter de Hooch, Adriaen Coorte, Gerard ter Borch, Jan van Goyen and a love letter to them all in their industry and luminous brilliance. If you didn't love them already it would be hard not to be persuaded.

She is able to see what is there in a painting simply by looking but she sees more than I ever have in, for instance, De Hooch's Courtyard in Delft, how the red shutter on the left rhymes with its counterpart on the right and the oval window at the top with the one seen behind it in the hallway, the recession of the arches. 

Her appreciation of Vermeer's Little Street, a cheap print of which has been on my wall for decades, enhances its familiar, enchanting quiet all over again. She is a gorgeous writer, enthralled as she is by her subject but calmly if thoroughly impressed, as one is by her who is unostentatious but every so often just nudges the reader with a word like 'brindling' in regretting that, of her father,

Photographs can never give me the exact brindling of greens and greys in his irises; the digital camera is too volatile and contingent and cannot resist noting the play of light more than fixity of hue.

One might do for her writing what she does for painting and appreciate the almost unnoticed smuggling in of an apposite semi-colon, that much derided item of punctuation that not so many writers use or even understand these days. It's the question mark that could more tastefully be allowed to fall into dis-use, isn't it.

These artists bring with them,

a mysterious kind of beauty, a strangeness to arouse and disturb, an infinite and fathomless world.

from Coorte's luminous asparagus to his disturbing collection of shells, some remarkable commentary on a self-portrait by Gerard ter Borch which would otherwise have looked very mundane to me and a welcome chance to be reacquainted with an old favourite, Hendrick Avercamp.

There is, as all good stories need, a villain. Joshua Reynolds didn't seem to 'get it', as if to show that England has always had a problem with its euro-sceptics. But, as a passage on colour, how eyes work and her daughter's scotoma go some way to explaining, we all see things differently.

I am reminded, as I often am, of Sean O'Brien's line,

That art is all there is and might not be enough.

 

For some of us, yes, it just about is but with Sunday's Messiah still so magnificently re-echoing in the memory and this entirely different greatness equally re-iterating what one knew and then adding to it, it comes very close and one is grateful for how it very nearly is enough.