Laura Cumming first came to my attention as a writer when I read her family memoir On Chapel Sands (I review it very briefly here). The author is an art critic and her book Thunderclap is a mixture of memoir and art history which sounded fascinating. I bought a new paperback copy of this book a year or so ago and I included it in my Springcleaning Challenge because I couldn’t understand why I had not already read it.
The author talks in this book about her father, who was an artist, and the Dutch painter Carel Fabritius. She starts with her first introduction to Fabritius’ work and how his work affects her as a viewer – she describes her reaction as like a thunderclap and then uses this image again during the narrative when something is a great shock or surprise. The story of Fabritius’ life and his extraordinary death (another thunderclap) is interspersed with the life of the author’s father and also with her own love of the Dutch masters. There are quite a few pictures included in the text which illustrate what the author is saying – some of these are a little small in reproduction but you can always Google them for a better view.
I enjoy the Dutch pictures of the sixteenth century, although I know very little about this art. The book is informative and has encouraged me to look further into this period. I was also interested in the lives of the two artists and in the glimpses we see of the author’s development as an art critic. At first I couldn’t quite work out the structure of the book and it seemed a bit random but I soon came to enjoy the slow way that the author examined her subjects and I thought that the book was very interesting.
I have a small, but growing, collection of illustrated books about art and this one fits in well with those I already own – it will also encourage me to purchase more books about the pictures that are highlighted in this one.
Anne Is Reading 