Thunderclap

"Praise for Thunderclap ""If you haven't yet read Thunderclap by Laura Cumming--a brilliant exploration of Carl Fabritius, Vermeer and survival and loss--rush out and buy it. By far the best book on art of the Netherlands that I've read."" --Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes and Letters to Camondo ""Laura Cumming has fashioned a book that combines memoir, art criticism and history to illuminating effect."" --New York Times Book Review ""Wonderous...with Cumming's Proust-like meditations on time never to be recovered and art never to be produced, its thunderclap still echoes in my ears."" --Wall Street Journal ""Genre-defying . . . By weaving together vivid evocations of ones that 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 brings the dead to life in the very act of mourning them."" --New York Times Book Review ""Thunderclap is a glorious tribute to the two men who showed her the truth of the notion that paintings offer 'a land in themselves, a society, a place to be.'"" --The Economist ""Cumming writes with the sureness of carefully laid paint. This is not art historical scholarship of the academic kind. It is an emotionally informed approach to art... She brings Carel Fabritius out of the shadows, making us see why he is so much more than the missing link in someone else's story."" --The Guardian ""Thunderclap combines first-rate art history with deeply felt memoir . . . A defiant aesthete, Cumming's gentle, meditative prose is itself an evocation of the hushed world of the art she loves."" --The Washington Post ""A lustrous meditation on the lives and after-lives of artists...with a novelist's pace, a critic's eye, a daughter's heart."" --Financial Times *Best Summer Books of 2023*"