Overview

Named a Top 100 Must-Read Book of the Year by Time and a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker * Winner of the 2024 Writers' Prize for Nonfiction * Shortlisted for the Inaugural Women's Prize for Nonfiction * Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 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).

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9781982181758

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Reviews

"Praise for Thunderclap ""Genre-defying . . . Cumming clearly loves the paintings of the 17th-century Dutch. 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 ""Cumming's descriptions of what is in front of her eyes are often incandescently beautiful, and well informed. She has a special ability to transport her readers, presenting historical facts and scientific developments as the marvels they are. Her curiosity is infectious--you don't have to love Dutch art to love this book, though you may well come away with a renewed sense of its value. We can luxuriate in visiting the Dutch Golden Age with such a humane and knowledgeable guide."" --Air Mail ""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, always paying attention to the fact that each person's vision is different. 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."" --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. Thunderclap does what Fabritius's sibylline scenes do: It does not redescribe so much as reimagine. Good criticism, like good art, does not leave the world intact. It, too, provides a shimmering new place where we can live and look."" --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* ""Cumming is a writer of exceptional acuity, responsiveness, and poetic grace. With stellar reproductions accompanying Cumming's vibrant memories and deep musings, Thunderclap is an incisive and eye-opening, fascinating and amusing, loving and grateful chronicle."" --Booklist, Starred Review ""A tender homage to art, Cumming melds memoir, art history, and biography in an elegant, beautifully illustrated meditation on art, desire, imagination, and memory. From shards of evidence, Cumming has created a nuanced portrait of an enigmatic artist whose works have profoundly affected her. Moving reflections rendered in precise, radiant prose."" --Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review ""In this vivid history of the golden age of Dutch painting and 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."" --Publishers Weekly ""There's a passionate energy in this book, a dexterity of description and narrative and a sensitivity to the subtleties of painting and personal memory that leaves you utterly breathless and transfixed. You are never going to read a better book about the experience of art--and of love."" --Philip Hoare, author of Albert and the Whale: Albrecht Dürer and How Art Imagines Our World ""A work at once generous and private (family love spills bright from the book) that shows us how it is to live and die, as a painter must, by light and dark and their transmission. Cumming reconsiders the lives of painters of the Golden Age of Dutch painting, most especially Carel Fabritius, whose brief, sad life and few works she summons . . . in prose that shines."" --Candia McWilliam, author of What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness ""A paragon of staggering insight and exquisite beauty. Delicate, exact, visionary, personal."" --Keggie Carew, author of Beastly: The 40,000-Year Story of Animals and Us ""An intimate and compelling investigation of the art of memory, and what survives of us."" --Nancy Campbell, author of Fifty Words for Snow"

"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 ""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*"

"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*"

Author Information

Laura Cumming has been the art critic of The Observer (London) since 1999. Previously, she was arts editor of The New Statesman (UK), literary editor of The Listener (UK), and deputy editor of Literary Review. She is a former columnist for The Herald (Scotland) and has contributed to the Evening Standard (London), The Guardian, L'Express, and Vogue. Her book The Vanishing Velazquez was a New York Times bestseller, a Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was longlisted for the Bailie Gifford Prize.

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