Thunderclap
A memoir of art and life & sudden death
Published on 16. May 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
272 pages
978-1-5299-2253-0 (ISBN)
Description
**WINNER OF THE SALTIRE BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2024**
**WINNER OF THE WRITERS' PRIZE 2024 | NON-FICTION**
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024**
A beautifully illustrated new memoir of a life in art, a father and daughter, and what a shared love of a painting can come to mean.
'Brilliant' Edmund de Waal * 'Captivating' Nina Stibbe * 'Extraordinary' India Knight
On the morning of 12 October 1654, a gunpowder explosion devastated the Dutch city of Delft. Among the fatalities was the painter Carel Fabritius, dead at thirty-two, leaving behind his haunting masterpiece The Goldfinch.
Thunderclap explores what happened to Fabritius before and after the disaster whilst interweaving the lives of Laura Cumming, her painter father and the great artists of the Dutch Golden Age. It takes the reader from seventeenth-century Delft to twentieth-century Scottish islands, from Rembrandt's studio to wartime America and contemporary London. This is a book about what a picture may come to mean, how it can enter your life and change your thinking in a thunderclap.
'Superb...this book taught me to see anew' Daily Telegraph
'A book that often borders on the sublime in its sentiment and beauty' Sunday Times
**WINNER OF THE WRITERS' PRIZE 2024 | NON-FICTION**
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024**
A beautifully illustrated new memoir of a life in art, a father and daughter, and what a shared love of a painting can come to mean.
'Brilliant' Edmund de Waal * 'Captivating' Nina Stibbe * 'Extraordinary' India Knight
On the morning of 12 October 1654, a gunpowder explosion devastated the Dutch city of Delft. Among the fatalities was the painter Carel Fabritius, dead at thirty-two, leaving behind his haunting masterpiece The Goldfinch.
Thunderclap explores what happened to Fabritius before and after the disaster whilst interweaving the lives of Laura Cumming, her painter father and the great artists of the Dutch Golden Age. It takes the reader from seventeenth-century Delft to twentieth-century Scottish islands, from Rembrandt's studio to wartime America and contemporary London. This is a book about what a picture may come to mean, how it can enter your life and change your thinking in a thunderclap.
'Superb...this book taught me to see anew' Daily Telegraph
'A book that often borders on the sublime in its sentiment and beauty' Sunday Times
Reviews / Votes
A book that often borders on the sublime in its sentiment and beauty * Sunday Times * This is an extraordinary book, full of beauty and feeling and immediacy and depth (and impressive detective work)...Thunderclap is a work of genius -- India Knight One of the most captivating books I have ever read... Delightful, intimate, and dotted with beautiful art. A wonderful read (or a great present) for anyone who loves stories and art * Nina Stibbe * Cumming is a word-painter ... When something fascinates Laura Cumming, she makes sure, with her beguiling prose, that we too are caught up in her fascination * The Times * Cumming clearly loves these paintings, and by weaving together vivid evocations of ones that particularly move her with brief biographies of the men and women who painted them, she invites us to share that love * New York Times * Exquisite... [Cumming's] pages are themselves lovely exercises in poetic vision and stay with you long after you finish -- Simon Schama, author of BELONGING * Guardian * [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 * A superb tribute to the masterpieces of the Dutch Golden Age, and the father who taught her how to see them ... In asking why we return to paintings across decades and centuries, this book taught me to see anew * Telegraph * [A] fascinating amalgam of insightful art appreciation and a haunting personal story * Sunday Times, *Books of the Year* * An intriguing, ambitious and tender blend of art history and personal memoir, this beautifully illustrated book is one to read and re-read * Daily Mail, *Books of the Year* *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Vintage Publishing
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 197 mm
Width: 127 mm
Thickness: 18 mm
Weight
426 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-5299-2253-0 (9781529922530)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
07/2023
Vintage Digital
€14.99
Available for download
Person
Laura Cumming has been chief art critic of the Observer since 1999. Her books include A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits (2009) and The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velazquez (2016) which won the James Tait Black Biography Prize. Her family memoir, On Chapel Sands: my Mother and other Missing Persons (2019) was a Sunday Times bestseller and shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford, Costa and Rathbone's Folio prizes.