Donna Tartt, Carel Fabritius, and The Goldfinch

 

Once morning in 1654, in the city of Delft in Holland, there was a "thunderclap". That was the way the people of Delft described the  explosion of a  factory containing 90,000 pounds of gunpowder. Large sections of the city were devastate, and 100 people died. 

Carole Fabritius was among them, and that may be why so few people have heard of this artist, who had been a  pupil of Rembrandt, and, before he reached his thirties, was already an  acclaimed painter of the Dutch school. He left a sadly small portfolio of work, and it's clear might have gone on to paint so much more, if he had survived the blast.

One of his most beloved works is also one of the most upsetting, from the viewpoint of an animal lover; The Goldfinch.  Just 9X13 inches, and possibly as a trompe d'oeil and perhaps a clever part of a window shutter, it is beautifully rendered. A small songbird sits on its perch, staring out at the viewer. Every feather is a perfect rendering. And the little gold chain that prevents the bird from seeking its freedom is lost in shadow, you have to peer closely to see that the goldfinch is a captive. It was sitting in Fabritius's workroom, almost next door to the factory, when the blast destroyed almost everything there, including the artist himself.

Donna Tartt launching The Goldfinch in Amsterdam
. Photograph: Bas Czerwinski/AFP/Getty Images

When I read Donna Tartt's third novel in 2014, titled The Goldfinch, I was expecting something grand, something with an explosion at the centre of it, because her previous two novels had been acclaimed and their powerful stories were still in my mind.

She certainly offered an explosion; moments after the story begins, a bomb blows out the New York's Metropolitan Museum. 14 year old Theo Decker is in one section, his mother elsewhere. She is killed by the blast.  As Theo tries to extricate himself from the wreckage, a dying man tells him to take the small, framed picture  lying in the dust. He thinks to  take to his mother for safekeeping and finds his way home; she never arrives. From then on, The Goldfinch, with its imploring theme of captive beauty, is his guilty secret, and a physical connection to his mother. It becomes something he can't bear to be rid of but something he cannot admit he possesses.

How fittingly linked these two stories are. The fiction of a boy who walked out of an explosion with the painting of an artist who died in an explosion.  The Goldfinch, painted in the year of Fabricius's death, was one of only about 12 of his paintings to have survived the tragic explosion, and  in Tartt's story, it survives again, albeit in a setting it has never traveled to; it's hung in The Haig. 

I was reminded of The Goldfinch when I read Laura Cumming's latest book

on art; Thunderclap. Although the focus of this book is Fabritius and his works, she also looks at her own approach to art, as an art critic. She says, 'We see pictures in time and place. We cannot see them otherwise. They are fragments of our lives, moments of existence…' I wonder if that is also true of fiction; certainly, a school of literature theory suggests that works can only be judged though the eyes of the reader, who brings their own emotional smörgåsbord to the interpretation.

Certainly, I began reading The Goldfinch knowing nothing about the painting, or having even heard of Carel Fabritius, but I devoured this long book; it reminded me of Dickens in its complexity and with its whirlwind of amazing characters, and its 'cause and effect' plotting – the dying man who tells Theo to take the painting is guardian to a young girl named Pippa, who was also in the museum when the bomb exploded, and is the only person who Theo feels can understand his heart, as they both lost someone dear in the explosion. Their lives will collide and separate, repeatedly, throughout the book. 

And yet, Tartt told The Telegraph, shortly after publishing the book that she hadn't even known about the Delft Thunderclap when she wrote it.  She said. 'The the first time I saw it, I connected very strongly with it. This little bird, so brave and so dignified, and then you see that terrible little chain…' She was simply looking for the right painting, that would be small enough to carry and would appeal to a child. 

The rôle of synchronicity in creating a novel can make one gasp. For, if Tartt didn't know much about Fabritius’ death when she chose the painting, why is her central character called Theo Decker? Because at the time of his death Fabritius was painting the portrait of a church deacon named Simon Decker. 

Writing is full of such coincidence, as Tartt admits: 

'It all fit together in ways I could never have imagined. When coincidences like that start happening you know the muses are at your side. ”

It's good to know that when such amazing moments occur, the writer should grasp them with both hands.