Fabritius and the Goldfinch (Kindle Single)

by Deborah Davis

  Fabritius also demonstrated great ingenuity when he painted a portrait of his benefactor, Abraham de Potter. The fifty-six-year-old merchant was not adventurous — he was a solid, respectable burgher who wanted a good likeness, but he was willing to let Fabritius veer from conventional portraiture in other ways. De Potter is dressed in a traditional linen ruff and dark suit, his facial hair neatly oiled and combed, his hands clasped. His classic pose could have been executed by any of a dozen other Dutch painters … except for the wall behind him. In Fabritius’ hands, the background is light and the stucco has texture, including patches that seem worn and crumbling. To reinforce the idea that the wall is real, Fabritius added a whimsical element to trick the eye: a protruding nail that looks as if it were haphazardly hammered into place.

  With every new painting, Fabritius proved that he had a unique ability to excel in any genre. His history paintings were vivid; his portraits simultaneously dignified and alive. His touch was light, but his ideas were deep. Seven years after the tragedies that robbed him of his happily-ever-after life with Aeltje and their children, Fabritius found himself at a point where he was productive and could once again imagine a future. One way to make this happen, he decided, was to stop being rootless. He had spent too many years shuttling back and forth between Amsterdam and Middenbeemster. He needed to settle down in a place without painful memories, a place that would represent a fresh start.

  Sometime during the summer of 1650, Fabritius decided to move to Delft. It was a city that existed to be beautiful and to produce beautiful things, especially finely etched Delftware china and tiles and richly colored textiles. Best of all, Delft boasted a growing community of artists and artisans. In short order, he met Agatha van Pruyssen, a widow whose sister, Maria, was a painter.

  Fabritius was still a young man, only twenty-eight, with his best years ahead of him. He gave himself permission to start over with Agatha as his partner. The couple announced their betrothal on August 14, 1650, the notice stating that “Carel Fabritius, widower, living on the Oude Delft, and Agatha van Pruyssen, widow of Volckerus Vosh, also living there,” intended to marry. Three weeks later they became husband and wife.

  Chapter Four

  As Fabritius happily discovered, Delft was a city that felt instantly like home. Diarist Samuel Pepys described it as “a most sweet town with bridges and rivers at the end of every street.” Its narrow thoroughfares and scenic canals were laid out in a grid that was easy to navigate, and most places, from the city’s two impressive churches, the Oude Kerk and the Nieuwe Kerk, to its taverns and pharmacies, were within walking distance of his rooms on the Oude Delft Canal. Many artists lived in his neighborhood and Fabritius quickly started recognizing their faces.

  Like flowers, the artists of Delft bloomed everywhere and came in all different varieties. Worldly Leonaert Bramer was known for his genre and history paintings and atmospheric night scenes. Cantankerous Emanuel de Witte and austere Gerard Houckgeest were experimenting with new ways to depict interiors, especially the vast open spaces in the city’s churches. Paulus Potter was famous for his noble cows. Egbert van der Poel specialized in landscapes and farmyard scenes, and the clever Vosmaer brothers, Daniel and Nicolaes, painted landscapes and seascapes, respectively. The list went on to include artists who painted portraits, still-lifes, even battle scenes. According to the rules of the St. Lucas Guild, the all-powerful union that controlled the business of art in Delft, a working artist was supposed to have at least one specialty.

  “Artist,” as defined by guild regulations, was a fairly broad term. When the St. Lucas guild was formed in 1611, its membership included “all those earning their living here by the art of painting, be it with fine brushes or otherwise, in oil or watercolors,; glassmakers; glass-sellers; faienciers; tapestry-makers; embroiderers; engravers; sculptors working in wood, stone, or other substance; scabbard-makers; art-printers; booksellers; sellers of prints and paintings, of whatever kind they may be.” Eventually, the tapestry-makers were dropped, but the guild had an iron-clad hold on everyone else in Delft who had anything to do with the art world, including dealers. Generally, an aspiring artist became a member by serving a lengthy apprenticeship, passing a test, and paying annual dues. There was no escaping the long arm of the guild. An artist who was not on the books could neither sell his work in Delft nor have an apprentice (another way of supplementing income).

  Rebel that he was, Fabritius did not join the guild immediately upon moving to Delft, which suggested that he may have been working elsewhere when he first lived there. However, his very presence in town linked him to the so-called Delft School of painting. The Delft School wasn’t an actual school, or even an official movement. Rather, it was a golden period when a community of extraordinarily talented artists explored new ways of using light and color, and of handling perspective and composition in their works. Fabritius had come to the right place at the right time. Delft was an incubator, a think tank, a place where he could expand and refine his talents and run off in a dozen exciting new directions.

  For example, Fabritius and his old schoolmate Samuel van Hoogstraten were fascinated by the notion of experimenting with perspective, of moving away from flat, one-dimensional pictures and creating the illusion of depth by painting the equivalent of the modern-day wide-angle “shot.” Fabritius carried out this idea brilliantly in View in Delft, a small oil on canvas (6 1/16th inches by 12 7/16 inches) depicting the New Church at the intersection of two streets, the Oude Langendijk and the Vrouwenrecht. On one side of the painting, a man sits across from the church, next to a table of musical instruments. On the other, a tree and a row of houses stretch into the distance. The picture looks weirdly curved, with extreme angles, until one imagines it mounted inside something called a “perspective box.”

  Fabritius and Van Hoogstraten may have invented this curious Dutch contraption, which went on to become popular in other parts of the world as a “peepshow.” It was a triangular cabinet meant to hold a curved, painted image, in this instance, a townscape of one of Delft’s most identifiable locations. The box had a carefully placed peephole, and when a spectator looked through it, his eye perceived the exaggerated curve as depth, and the scene came to life in 3-D. Fabritius and Van Hoogstraten competed to make the most ingenious perspective box and, according to contemporary accounts, their efforts were very impressive. One fan of Fabritius’ work wrote that he “was so quick and sure in the use of perspective … that [in the judgment of many connoisseurs] he has never been equaled.”8

  Once Fabritius and Agatha were settled, he started to engage with the artists he met in Delft. Daniel Vosmaer and Egbert van der Poel were men of a similar age and at similar points in their careers, although they had joined the guild in 1650 and were already authorized artists. When Fabritius took a long, hard look at his dwindling finances, he acknowledged that it was time to follow suit. He still owed several hundred guilders to the De Potters and was not sure how he was going to repay such a sizable loan. He recently had borrowed 200 guilders from a sympathetic friend and he had an outstanding bill of 5 guilders with merchant Simon Jansz for a supply of French wine. His debts were mounting and the only solution was to become a master painter and start selling his work to make money. On October 29, 1652, Fabritius officially joined the St. Lucas Guild, paying the requisite fee (or rather, half of it, with the other half promised), knowing that it was the only way to dig himself out of his financial hole.

  Membership’s first benefit came in the form of Matthias Spoors, the young aspiring artist who became his apprentice. Spoors reported for work to perform the usual duties — grinding paint, preparing canvases, fetching beer, and whatever else Fabritius asked. In return, the master painter was obliged to give his pupil art lessons, provide drawing and painting assignments, and critique his work in a productive way. Normally, an apprentice served for six years before becoming a guild painter. Spoors discovered he was working at a very busy studio with an impassioned artist at its helm from
whom he would learn a good deal. Fabritius was a dynamo, blazing with ideas for ambitious new projects. He was also open to commissions and collaborations, which sometimes came from unexpected places.

  He was flattered when the young Delft artist Pieter Leendertsz van der Vin asked him to paint double portraits of himself and his wife. Then, the Vosmaer brothers recruited him to work on a large painting — a panoramic representation of various Delft scenes — they were preparing for the Town Hall. Daniel Vosmaer painted the landscape portion of the canvas, Nichols Vosmaer took care of his specialty, the sea and the ships, while Fabritius did some overall drawing and retouching. In February, when Fabritius renewed the loan he had borrowed from Jasper de Potter, he hinted he might be in a position to pay the principal and the interest that had accrued over the years “with the sale of a large painting at present hanging in the town hall” — the Vosmaer painting — but that was wishful thinking.9 Money, or the lack thereof, was still very much an issue.

  Fabritius wasn’t the only one in his circle on shaky financial ground. In August, he served as witness when Egbert van der Poel borrowed 217 guilders from Arent Jansz, a Delft innkeeper, to pay for canvases and supplies. Fortunately, Jansz was an art lover who was willing to accept paintings as payment. For a struggling artist, solvency was always an elusive few hundred guilders away, and money was borrowed and (perhaps) repaid over and over again. Even successful artists had to be prudent. Rumor had it that the great Rembrandt — a notorious spendthrift — was drowning under the weight of his mortgage and other obligations and was on the verge of bankruptcy.

  One way to stay afloat, Fabritius decided, was to cut down on living expenses. He and Agatha moved to the Doelenstratt, a street in the edgier part of Delft, near the Rijn-Schiekanaal. Egbert van der Poel and his family lived next door, and a few other adventurous artists maintained studios in the working-class neighborhood, which was less fashionable, but significantly more affordable, than the Oude Delft. Fabritius needed more room because his household expanded when Agatha’s father died and her mother, Judick van Pruyssen, came to live with them. Delft was also a home-away-from-home for Fabritius’ brother Barent, who had fallen in love with a young woman named Catharina Mussers during one of his visits to Delft, and subsequently married her.

  In 1654, a rejuvenated Fabritius threw himself into a number of exciting projects at his new studio, including a self-portrait (Young Man in Fur Cap). The first time he painted his own image, his face was etched with grief, his eyes sorrowful. Six years later, he was a new man, comfortable in his own skin … and in his own painting. In the earlier portrait, the world weighed heavily on poor Fabritius — the background, though beautifully rendered, loomed so large that it threatened to push him out of the picture. This time, Fabritius positioned himself front and center, looking composed, even content, his gaze clear and knowing. His painting style was evolving, too. Fabritius replaced the heavy slashes of color that characterized his first Self-Portrait with brush strokes that were smooth and fluid, and demonstrated a lighter, more controlled touch.

  That same year, Fabritius started working on The Sentry. In this painting, a guard sits on a bench by a city gate, his gun in his lap, his back against a wall, his legs extended. His dog is next to him, watching him closely The location could be any side street in Delft, but unlike the familiar landmark and intersection in View in Delft, the setting is not instantly identifiable. In fact, nothing about the painting is clear.

  This seemingly straightforward portrayal of a soldier and his pet is, in fact, full of mystery. Is the guard concentrating on his gun, preparing to make some adjustment? Or, is he sleeping when he should be on duty? Why is a sentry stationed at what appears to be an abandoned gate in a quiet part of town? Or, is the dog, watching its master so intently, the sentry? What of the strange architectural elements behind the man — a column that supports nothing, and stairs that go nowhere? And, although the meaning is obscure, the painting is bathed in light. By taking an ordinary scene and investing it with ambiguity, Fabritius compels his viewers to think about what they see.

  Fabritius’ work caught the eye of a Delft native, a twenty-two-year-old artist named Johannes Vermeer. He was the son of Reynier Janszoon, a Master Arts Dealer who bought and sold paintings, worked in the silk trade, and owned and operated a popular tavern called the Mechelen. When Vermeer decided to become a professional artist, he did so with his family’s blessing. He served the requisite number of years as an apprentice (although the details of his training and the identity of his teacher are unknown), and joined the St. Lucas Guild as a painter of Genres on December 29, 1653.

  Like Fabritius, Vermeer married young. His wife, Catharina Bolnes, was the daughter of a wealthy Catholic widow who prided herself on being an art connoisseur, so she provided the newlyweds with some financial support. Instead of having to hustle for his every guilder, Vermeer had time to think about how — and what — he wanted to paint. Because he grew up surrounded by art, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the painters in Delft: great, good, bad, and indifferent. The best artist to study, he determined, the one who shared his interest in color, space, light, and perspective, was Carel Fabritius.

  While there is no hard evidence confirming that Vermeer was Fabritius’ student, sources as diverse as art historians and novelists suggest that they worked together, and “the younger artist admired and learned” from the iconoclastic master. Perhaps it was Fabritius who inspired Vermeer to place dark figures against pale walls, to create images that were poetic instead of photographic, and to experiment with light, shadow, and space. Someone did, and Vermeer started on an artistic path that led to the creation of such masterpieces as Girl with a Pearl Earring.

  Delft was a small city with a defined art world, and Fabritius’ paintings and perspective boxes, along with the fact that he had studied with Rembrandt, made him the artist to watch. His reputation was growing. The Delft Town Council acknowledged his talent by commissioning him to paint coats of arms for municipal buildings. The assignment wasn’t particularly important or lucrative (he was paid 12 guilders). But when the council contracted Fabritius to do the work, it meant it chose him over hundreds of guild members who could have done the job.

  Fabritius hoped more commissions would follow, so he was pleased when Simon Decker, the sexton at the Oude Kerk, asked him to paint his portrait. After giving the older man a resounding yes, Fabritius started on the assignment. But even as he planned the placement of Decker’s figure on the canvas and considered the color palette, his mind wandered. He was preoccupied with an idea for a deceptively simple, yet utterly ambiguous, project that he was eager to begin.

  Fabritius wanted to paint a portrait of a bird — not a still-life of a slaughtered game bird dripping with blood; nor one of Paul de Vos’ fantasy gatherings of parrots, macaws, nightingales, ducks, and other birds incapable of existing in the same landscape; or a Gerrit Dou genre scene of a maiden playing with assorted Disney-like creatures in an idyllic setting. Rather, this would be a living, breathing bird that could be seen in everyday Delft. A bird so real, in fact, it would appear to be in the room with the spectator, resting on its high perch. The bird he had in mind was a goldfinch.

  Chapter Five

  The European goldfinch, or Carduelis carduelis, has a pointed beak, a chestnut brown back, a white underside, black wings, and a black and white tail. What elevates the bird from ordinary to spectacular is that this rather plain little body, rarely longer than six inches, serves as a background for unexpected flashes of color. A legend suggests that when God created birds, he hand-painted their feathers with a special palette of colors. The other birds clamored to be first, fighting for the most vivid hues. But the little goldfinch politely held back, until most of the paints were gone. God rewarded his patience with the most brilliant colors of all, placing a streak of bright gold yellow on his wing and a mask of crimson on his face.

  Because of these dramatic decorations, the goldfinch is marvelous in motion.
When he unfurls his wings and displays the intricate yellow and black pattern on his feathers, he looks more like a tropical butterfly than a bird. What’s more, he often behaves like a butterfly. A skilled acrobat, the goldfinch undulates with light, dance-like movements, and balances agilely on branches and perches — gracefully turning upside down and right-side up in a perpetual avian ballet.

  A prized songbird, the goldfinch sings sweetly, offering silvery bursts of melody, especially the male. He makes tinkling, twittering sounds, such as “ticke lit,” and trills musical passages with a distinct beginning and end, pausing briefly before starting his next song. The consummate performer, the goldfinch sways back and forth and hops gracefully while he sings, seemingly enchanted by his own music. The Italian Baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi was so enthralled by the goldfinch’s song that he wrote Il Cardellino (The Goldfinch), a concerto for flute and strings that pays homage to the bird’s musical talents.

  The goldfinch looks delicate, but in addition to being beautiful and entertaining, he is also the gardener’s best friend, using his powerful, tweezers-like beak to feed on the kinds of seeds most birds disdain, such as bristly thistles and other harmful weeds. In fact, the goldfinch’s scientific name, carduelis, comes from cardulus, the Latin word for thistle. By eating these thorny garden pests, he prevents these plants from propagating and overtaking the grass and flowers.

  Ornithologists have ascribed some surprisingly human characteristics to the goldfinch, including being a devoted parent. During the spring breeding season, the female carefully builds a strong, tidy nest high in a tree, usually at the end of a branch. This small, cup-like dwelling serves as a cradle by allowing the breeze to rock her newborns while they sleep. One birder credited a goldfinch couple with great sagacity having witnessed them make — and correct — a terrible mistake. They built a nest on a branch that was too weak, but immediately gathered thick twigs and, with their beaks and claws, attached them to support the original branch.