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 illuminates one of the most celebrated periods in art history.
Part homage to her father and part critical study of Dutch painting, Cumming’s genre-spanning book is first and foremost a biography. Its elegiac meanderings return time and time again to the figure of Carel Fabritius ... [A] tender reading ... Cumming’s gentle, meditative prose is itself an evocation of the hushed world of the art she loves. Her writing is soft and Sebaldian, with long, lulling sentences. And of course it contains a whole gallery of verbal images, in addition to pictures of paintings.
Genre-defying ... Cumming suggests that we recall the past through pictures ... 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 ... Like all good elegists, Cumming, too, brings the dead to life in the very act of mourning them.
In one brief essay-like chapter after another, the author recounts her own adventures in art, weaving together vignettes and memories of her father, anecdotes about her career as an art critic, and observations and analyses of the lives and works of 17th-century Dutch artists ... Wondrous ... Its thunderclap still echoes in my ears.
