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.
_____________________Praise for On Chapel Sands a Sunday Times Memoir of the Year: 'Cumming
skilfully withholds key twists in the tale revealing them at just the right moment' The Times
'Outstanding . . . A peerless detective story that keeps you guessing to the end' Sunday Times
Praise for The Vanishing Man winner of the James Tait Black Prize: 'Superb and original'
Sunday Times 'Sumptuous . . . A gleaming work of someone at the peak of her craft' New York
Times
