MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE review The Stranger, Undertone, and Outcome
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‘So familiar and yet so unfathomable’
If 17th-century Dutch art is your thing this must be your book, believes MICHAL BONCZA
ENIGMATIC: Carel Fabritius’ View of Delft, with a Musical Instrument Seller’s Stall
[Kotomi_/CC]
WILL STONE applauds the anniversary tour of Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches by Madchester icons, Shaun and Bez
JAN WOOLF invigilates images that meditate on Palestine, and the people who witness them
A murderous convention of crime writers, a hymn to nursing, a monster hunt, and robber baron capitalism
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a three-hander that broaches big themes, but doesn’t transcend dry academia
DAN GLAZEBROOK eavesdrops on the bourgeois intelligentsia and the stories it tells itself at this moment of crisis
Thunderclap: A memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death
by Laura Cummings
Chatto and Windus £12.99
THE thunderclap of the title was a gunpowder explosion on October 12 1654, which devastated the city of Delft killing over a hundred and leaving thousands injured. Among the dead was Carel Fabritius, Rembrandt van Rijn’s most promising apprentice.
Fabritius holds a special fascination for Laura Cummings as does his View of Delft, with a Musical Instrument Seller’s Stall, painted two years before his death (at the National Gallery, London): “for pictures can shore you up, remind you of who you are and what you stand for.”
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