Carel Fabritius’ painting ‘The Goldfinch’ has not had an easy time of it, particularly in its literary life.
In Donna Tartt’s celebrated novel by the same name (released as a movie this weekend), the painting survived a New York City terrorist attack only to be plucked out of the rubble by a young boy, filched from him by his best friend, traded around the international black market, and then restored to the hallowed halls from whence it came following a dramatic law enforcement rescue.
In real life, ‘The Goldfinch’ was witness to an equally harrowing tragedy, but its fate in the aftermath was a bit more fortunate. In the mid-17th century, the end times came for the Dutch town of Delft, or at least that’s what residents believed.
At 11:30 a.m. on Oct. 12, 1654, the city’s magazine containing 90,000 pounds of gunpowder suddenly blew up in an event that became known as the Delft Thunderclap. Chris Chambers at Radio Netherlands says the disaster was “one of the loudest explosions the Netherlands has ever heard.”
Much of the town was destroyed or heavily damaged, and over a hundred lives were lost, including that of Fabritius, who was in his studio mid-portrait sitting when the accident occurred. It is believed that most of the 33-year-old art prodigy’s work was destroyed. Today, only around 12 or so paintings including ‘The Goldfinch’ are believed to have survived from the artist who was among the best of his day.
“[Fabritius] was an excellent and outstanding painter who was so skilled and unerring in the manner of ‘perspectives’ as well as naturalistic coloring and the handling of his paint that (in the opinion of many connoisseurs of art) he never had an equal,” wrote the Dutch writer Dirck van Bleyswijck in 1667.
It’s hard to parse the life of a 17th-century man who vanished so young and so thoroughly. Not only did Fabritius lose his life and much of his work, but records pertaining to both were also incinerated in the blast.
For centuries, details like the artist’s age at the moment of his untimely death were debated, as was his birthplace and the particulars of his career. While his surviving art proves that he was supremely talented, it is difficult to trace his evolution as a painter when so few paintings remain.
But what has clarified over the years as Fabritius has emerged from the obscurity that blanketed his reputation following the Thunderclap is that he was truly a master of the Dutch Golden Age.
The artist grew up the son of a painter in the small town of Middenbeemster north of Amsterdam. Both he and two of his brothers followed in their father’s footsteps, with Fabritius showing a talent for the trade at a very young age. Around 20, the newly married painter moved to Amsterdam to study under the great Dutch master Rembrandt.
The surviving works from this period show the clear influence of his teacher, but Fabritius was also quick to begin to develop his own style. In Vermeer and the Delft School, Walter Liedtke writes that he “developed a thinner technique and, of course, a lighter palette. His touch is more delicate and more precisely descriptive… without becoming linear.”
It’s these qualities that intrigue Theo’s mother in Tartt’s novel. Shortly before the terrorist attack at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that would take her life and set the plot of the epic coming-of-age tale in motion, Audrey Decker tells her son that ‘The Goldfinch’ “is just about the first painting I ever really loved,” and it’s the airy quality of the work, “the clear pure daylight,” that drew her in as a young girl.
About 10 years after Fabritius moved to Amsterdam, he left his teacher behind and moved to the city of Delft. There he took on portrait commissions, painted murals, and possibly even worked as a painter to the Prince of Orange.
He was one of the premier artists in the city and clearly made a name for himself even at his relatively young age. While definitive evidence is scarce, it is also believed that Fabritius took on Vermeer as a pupil and is thus the connection that explains the evolution in style between Rembrandt and the latter Dutch painter.
“Fabritius is the one that got away of the great Dutch painters,” Robert Fox wrote in The Guardian in 2006. “Today he is little more than a footnote in the lexicon of western art. From his self-portraits he appears a free spirit, a bit of a Jack the Lad around the workshops of Amsterdam and Delft.”
On the morning of October 12, 1654, Simon Decker, a former sexton of the city’s main church, was at Fabritius’s studio sitting for his portrait. It is believed that the artist’s mother-in-law and possibly a brother or brother-in-law, as well as his assistant were also in attendance.
What the studio crew didn’t know as they were going about their daily business is that an inspection was about to occur at the city’s gunpowder magazine housed in a former convent nearby. As the Radio Netherlands account points out, this location was not unusual. During times of war, a town needed easy access to their ammunition, so in Delft, the gunpowder was stored mostly underground in a building within the city’s walls.
Due to the ensuing catastrophe and lack of living witnesses to tell the tale, what exactly happened within the magazine that day remains unknown. It is believed that an inspector was sent to take a sample of the gunpowder. Did he accidentally drop a lamp or produce a small spark after struggling with a finicky lock and key? We’ll never know. What is known is that in one instant normal daily life was underway and in the next, Delft was forever changed as 90,000 pounds of gunpowder almost simultaneously erupted.
Chaos ensued. A quarter of the city was destroyed, with the area surrounding the magazine completely flattened. Two hundred homes were lost, another 300 had damage to windows and roofs, while the stained glass windows were blown out of the city’s churches. It was reported that windows were even broken in buildings located in The Hague, 12 miles away.
The city was not crowded on the day of the disaster as many of its occupants were attending a nearby market. But still, over a hundred people are believed to have lost their lives, with possibly up to a thousand sustaining injuries. Those who survived intact were faced with a scene straight out of hell. Not knowing what had produced the noisy inferno swirling around them, many initially believed that the world had come to end and the Book of Revelations was upon them.
While Fabritius’s companions that morning were killed in the blast, the artist survived the initial shock. Six or seven hours later, he was found still alive in the rubble of his home. Shortly after being extracted and sent to safety, he died or, as van Bleyswijck put it, “his oppressed soul departed his terribly beaten body.”
His oppressed soul would surely have been even more despondent had it known that the majority of his artistic output had been destroyed along with his life.
But all was not entirely lost. Over the centuries, Fabritius slowly emerged from obscurity to take his place among the Dutch greats and most of the dozen works he left behind followed suit, none more so than ‘The Goldfinch.’
Painted in the year of the artist’s death, ‘The Goldfinch’ not only survived the Delft Thunderclap, it went on to hang in the Mauritshuis in The Hague; it became a featured character in a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel; and it stars in the not-so-well-acclaimed movie adaptation.
Today, Fabritius’s name may not be as widely recognized as that of Rembrandt or Vermeer, but his gorgeous, diminutive painting of a chained bird is famous around the world.
