Overview

From the Sunday Times bestselling author, Laura Cumming, a kaleidoscopic memoir connecting her life as an art critic with the vivid world of her father's paintings and those of the Dutch Golden Age - richly illustrated in full colour throughout **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

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9781529922530

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Reviews

A book that often borders on the sublime in its sentiment and beauty * Sunday Times * Cumming is a word-painter ... When something fascinates Laura Cumming, she makes sure, with her beguiling prose, that we too are caught up in her fascination * The Times * 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 * New York Times * Exquisite... [Cumming's] pages are themselves lovely exercises in poetic vision and stay with you long after you finish -- Simon Schama, author of BELONGING * Guardian * No one writes art like Laura Cumming . . . There's a passionate energy in this book, a dexterity of description and narrative and a sensitivity to the subtleties of painting and personal memory that leaves you utterly breathless and transfixed. You are never going to read a better book about the experience of art - and of love * Philip Hoare, author of Albert & the Whale *

A book that often borders on the sublime in its sentiment and beauty * Sunday Times * One of the most captivating books I have ever read… Delightful, intimate, and dotted with beautiful art. A wonderful read (or a great present) for anyone who loves stories and art * Nina Stibbe * Cumming is a word-painter ... When something fascinates Laura Cumming, she makes sure, with her beguiling prose, that we too are caught up in her fascination * The Times * 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 * New York Times * Exquisite... [Cumming's] pages are themselves lovely exercises in poetic vision and stay with you long after you finish -- Simon Schama, author of BELONGING * Guardian *

Author Information

Laura Cumming has been chief art critic of the Observer since 1999. Her books include A Face to the World- On Self-Portraits (2009) and The Vanishing Man- In Pursuit of Velazquez (2016) which won the James Tait Black Biography Prize. Her family memoir, On Chapel Sands- my Mother and other Missing Persons (2019) was a Sunday Times bestseller and shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford, Costa and Rathbone's Folio prizes.

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