**SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024**
**WINNER OF THE WRITERS' PRIZE 2024 | NON-FICTION**
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
**LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024**From the Sunday Times-bestselling author of On Chapel Sands, shortlisted for the Costa Prize for Biography'No one writes art like Laura Cumming' Philip Hoare, author of Albert and the Whale'I will never look at any painting in the same way again' Polly Morland, author of A Fortunate Woman_____________________'We see with everything that we are'On the morning of 12 October 1654, in the Dutch city of Delft, a sudden explosion was followed by a thunderclap that could be heard more than seventy miles away. Carel Fabritius - now known across the world for his exquisite painting, The Goldfinch - had been at work in his studio. He, along with many others, would not survive the day. In Thunderclap, Laura Cumming reveals her passion for the art of the Dutch Golden Age and her determination to lift up the reputation of Fabritius. She reveals the Netherlands, where - wandering the narrow streets of Amsterdam, driving across the flatlands, or pausing at a quiet waterfront - she encounters the rich reality behind the shining beauty of Vermeer and Rembrandt, Hals and de Hooch. She shares too her relationship with her father, the Scottish artist James Cumming, who had his own deep connection to Dutch painting, and who taught her about colour, light and the rewards of looking deeply. 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, a sudden clarity of sight. This is also a book about the precariousness of human life - the way it may be snatched from us in an instant. What can art do to sustain us? The work that survives tells its own compelling story in these pages.
