In 1667, the prolific Dirck van Bleyswijck (the teenager who excitedly wrote about the Thunderclap while it was happening) finally published his comprehensive, multivolume history of Delft. Though he praised Fabritius for his great talent, he seemed far more interested in recounting the details of his death. Van Bleyswijck’ s publisher, Arnold Bon, who apparently was a frustrated poet, seized the opportunity to compose an ode to Fabritius entitled On the sad and most unfortunate death of the most renowned and skillful painter, Carel Fabritius, which he then printed along with the history.
His weary soul quite helpless for screaming,
Was nevertheless saved from this fearful distress,
But all-destructive and pitiless Death
Has cut his life’s thread.
So died the greatest artist
That Delft or even Holland has ever known.
As these lines suggest, Bon was prone to exaggeration; his writing was melodramatic (especially when he described Fabritius as sucking the “innermost secrets” from the “breasts and nipples” of “Pictura, Goddess of Art”); and his observations were banal (“Why Death, did you have to take him prematurely, when he was painting so cleverly with his distinguished brushes?” he actually asked).
Bon’s memorably bad poem posited one original thought. In the final stanza, he suggested that there was a connection between Fabritius and Vermeer. Given that Bon grew up in Delft, it was entirely possible that he was knowledgeable on the subject. Inexplicably, he wrote two versions of the last line, the first of which built to a strong finish.
Thus did the Phoenix, to our loss, expire,
In the midst and at the height of his powers,
But happily arose out of his fire
Vermeer, who masterfully trod his path.
The alternate ending was equally wretched, but slightly different — with Bon substituting the word “emulate” for “trod.”
Thus died this Phoenix when he was thirty years old,
In the midst and at the height of his powers,
But happily arose out of his fire
Vermeer, who masterfully was able to emulate him.
The year Bon’s poem was published, Vermeer was thirty-five-years-old and living in Delft with his wife and children. He was finishing The Art Lesson, one of his strongest paintings, and had a select group of collectors who appreciated the poetic clarity and vibrant colors of his tranquil genre scenes. Vermeer made money but, like Fabritius, never enough. When Bon named him Fabritius’ successor, he honored both men by suggesting that Fabritius was important enough to be worthy of a successor, and that Vermeer was important enough to follow in Fabritius’ footsteps. He also, presciently, linked Holland’s three most extraordinary artists — Rembrandt, Fabritius, and Vermeer, a triumvirate of talent spanning the entire Dutch Golden Age.
Bon, whoever he was, may have recognized the significance of Fabritius and Vermeer, but, with the passage of time, their reputations dimmed. In 1721, when artist/author Arnold Houbraken (who had been a pupil of Samuel von Hoogstraten) wrote Great Theater of Netherlandish Painters and Painteresses, his definitive tract on Dutch art, he capriciously determined which artists were worthy of being on his list. He included Fabritius — basically lifting information about his death from Van Bleyswijck — but, incredibly, failed to mention Vermeer, thereby condemning him to obscurity. As the art historian Philip Leslie Hale observed, “a reputation is made because one man in print, says another man is good … but, Houbraken, maliciously or no, had omitted to whisper the open sesame and the hall of fame was closed to Vermeer.”14 After Vermeer died in 1675, people forgot that he existed.
An interesting fact emerged in 1676, when a notary prepared an inventory of Vermeer’s estate. Three of the paintings in his collection were works by Fabritius. As usual, the notary was maddeningly terse in his descriptions of these items. There were two tronies by Fabritius in the main hall and, in the showroom, a small painting. Benjamin Binstock, author of Vermeer’s Family Secrets, suggests that the little piece may have been The Goldfinch, a fanciful, but intriguing, notion. 15
As a matter of fact, there is no record of what happened to The Goldfinch the day Fabritius’ house was destroyed in the explosion. There are indications that paintings were pulled out of the rubble and restored. And, in 1667, the artist Pieter van Asch testified that he had “repaired, repainted, and varnished” several works that had been damaged in the blast for a collector named Willem Janzs. Croonenburgh. One was a raempge, or a “window,” by Fabritius. These paintings and others were saved so, perhaps, The Goldfinch shared a similar fate. Whether it was thrown clear of the house as it collapsed and subsequently “rescued” from the debris by a helpful passer-by, or if it ended up on Vermeer’s wall until the time of his death, and then went elsewhere, The Goldfinch was lost.
By 1700, Fabritius and Vermeer were lost as well. Holland’s Golden Age of the seventeenth century had come to an end. After a century of primacy, the Dutch Republic had lost its edge and the rest of the world had caught up, and even surpassed the once-great nation. The areas the Dutch had dominated — trade, finance and, yes, art — had been taken over by more ambitious countries. London, not Amsterdam, had become the world’s financial capital. The Dutch remained prosperous, but they had lost the drive that made them “first” in everything. Their great accomplishments, their ships, trade routes, banks, and polders — like their artists — were all fading, soon to be forgotten.
Rembrandt was the one artist whose name endured. As might have been predicted given his spendthrift ways, he was plagued by financial problems and had to sell his property and possessions to pay his debts. His last great work, The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis, was rejected by the Amsterdam Town Hall, where it was meant to hang, but he continued to paint portraits and other commissions until he died in 1669. As is the case with so many artists, death was the beginning of a brand new chapter in Rembrandt’s career, as his fame spread from Holland to other parts of Europe. In France, Germany, and England, art students endeavored to imitate him, and collectors sought out his paintings, prints, and drawings. His popularity had a negative effect on other artists because opportunists, searching for any work that could pass as a Rembrandt, changed the original signature to that of the Master. Painters such as Fabritius, who had studied with Rembrandt and often emulated his style, were obliterated, their names scratched off their own canvases, or painted over, in an attempt to capitalize on the boom market for Rembrandts.
Fabritius resurfaced briefly in 1807, when a hack playwright named Adriaen Loosjes (who was every bit as untalented as Arnold Bon) made him the subject of a sensationalistic drama. Amelia Fabricius of Delft door Buskruid verworst (Amelia Fabritius, or Delft Destroyed by Gunpowder) tells the story of the Thunderclap and its effect on the lives of various characters, including Fabritius and his wife (erroneously called “Amelia” instead of Agatha). Loosjes seems to have taken every anecdote he ever heard about the tragedy and found a way to connect it to Fabritius, which made the artist a very busy casualty, delivering at least two near-death speeches before finally expiring at the end of Scene 7. But, the drama ends happily when “Amelia” finds the daughter she and Fabritius never had in real life, sitting in a highchair under a pile of debris, eating an apple — just like the famous toddler who was rescued in 1654.
The man who singlehandedly raised Fabritius and Vermeer from the dead was Étienne Joseph Théophile Thoré (who later used the pen name William Bürger, or Thoré-Bürger), a French writer, critic, and political dissident who was also a doggedly persistent art detective. In 1848, Thoré was so outspoken in his opposition to France’s newly elected president, Louis-Napoléon, that the ruler sentenced him to exile for ten years. Instead of lamenting his fate, Thoré decided to visit parts of Europe he had been longing to see. He was especially interested in returning to Holland because seventeenth-century Dutch art was in line with his democratic political beliefs. He called it “l’art pour l’homme,” art for the peopl
e.
During a previous trip to the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague, Thoré had fallen under the spell of a painting called View of the Town of Delft, which he described as “a superb and most unusual landscape.” He marveled at the artist’s extraordinary use of light and color, but was unfamiliar with his name, Jan van der Meer of Delft. He searched for information, but whether he looked up Van der Meer or Vermeer, he found nothing in the usual sources. Now, as an exile with abundant free time on his hands, Thoré planned to investigate the mysterious painter he called his “sphinx,” and hoped to locate more of his work.
He visited museums, private collections, and archives, ultimately identifying over seventy paintings he attributed to Vermeer, including The Procuress, one of the artist’s early paintings, The Officer and the Laughing Girl, and The Geographer. More than half of his “discoveries” turned out to have been painted by other artists, but Thoré uncovered an astonishing body of material, including photographs. Sometimes, when the price was right, Thoré rewarded himself by purchasing a Vermeer or two for his own collection. Of course, after he published two articles and a catalogue about the artist, Vermeer’s reputation was revivified, the prices of his work soared, and Thoré could no longer afford him!
While he was on his great Vermeer hunt, Thoré developed a passion for another Dutch artist — none other than Carel Fabritius. This passion seems to have begun in 1859, when Thoré visited Brussels to meet the Chevalier Joseph-Guillaume-Jean Camberlyn. The writer and the nobleman had a lot in common, because they shared a love of art and a hatred for Louis-Napoléon. Thoré was eager to see the family’s famous collection of paintings, drawings, and prints, and wandered from one chamber to another, until he came to a large attic. Camberlyn owned more art than he could display, so the space was filled with rejected pieces, “ses croutes,” or “his crumbs,” as he called them. As Thoré moved among the various paintings — here a Rembrandt, there a Paulus Potter — something small, slight, and wonderful, caught his eye; a picture of a little goldfinch standing on its perch. Two centuries after the Delft Thunderclap sent the painting flying from Fabritius’ studio, The Goldfinch finally “landed” in an attic in Brussels.
Thoré knew nothing about the painting or its artist, but he was curious to learn more. He consulted Houbraken, where he read the brief entry about Fabritius’ life, death and — courtesy of Arnold Bon — his connection to Vermeer, which made him all the more interesting. While there were no records of how The Goldfinch landed in Camberlyn’s collection, the chevalier might have acquired it while serving in the Dutch army in The Hague, a tour of duty that lasted from 1815 to 1826.16
Initially, Thoré’s reaction to The Goldfinch was restrained. He described the painting as “a mere trifle, but first-rate.” But “like” quickly turned to lust, and The Goldfinch became Thoré’s idée fixe. “Don’t forget I must have the goldfinch at any price,” he reminded his friend Felix Delhasse in 1861.17 By this time, Thoré had seen two paintings by Fabritius in the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam and was convinced the artist had great talent. One was the first Self-Portrait, incorrectly attributed to Rembrandt until 1850, when the fake signature came off during a restoration; the other was Fabritius’ 1648 Portrait of an Unknown Family. Thoré was so impressed by the family portrait that he was grief-stricken when it was destroyed in a fire in 1864. “… Why did fate not save it from the flames? In the whole school of Rembrandt, he is closest to the master, whom he did not imitate,” he praised. 18
It didn’t take long for Thoré to discover that works by Fabritius were harder to find than Vermeers, which made The Goldfinch all the more tantalizing. After Camberlyn died in 1861, Thoré was on a mission to acquire the painting. He came up with a plan to help the chevalier’s nephew and heir prepare a catalogue of family holdings for an upcoming auction, hoping the painting would be his payment. In 1865, his dream came true: the Camberlyn estate gave him The Goldfinch. “Felix, admire his plumage,” he wrote excitedly to his friend. “Its colors are as alive as on the first day. … Blessings to Chevalier Camberlyn. It is a superb gift that he’s given me”
For the next four years, Thoré kept The Goldfinch close. He was willing to sell any painting in his eclectic collection, except his two most treasured possessions, his little Fabritius and Vermeer’s A Lady Standing at a Virginal. When he became ill in 1869, Thoré kept The Goldfinch at his bedside. Perhaps he was hoping the bird would live up to its legend: that as a charadrius, or savior bird, it would pull disease from his body and grant him a second chance at life. However, the painting could do nothing for Thoré but give him pleasure, which it did until the moment he drew his last breath.
As Paul Mantz, Thoré’s friend and colleague in the art world, observed, “the charming bird sang a lot for him: but one knows the sad path of life; one knows how everything comes to an end; it is beneath another roof that The Goldfinch will henceforth strew the pearls of its song.”19
Chapter Eight
Thoré left his entire art collection to his dear friend Apolline Lacroix. Various works were auctioned off over the years, but it was not until 1892 that The Goldfinch was sold to Étienne-François Haro, a French art supply merchant and restorer, whose picturesque shop on the Left Bank serviced the greatest artists of the day. Haro was also a dealer, and a shrewd one at that. He paid 5500 francs for the painting and sold it three years later for 6200 francs. The buyer was Abraham Bredius, the flamboyant director of the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague, who had a taste for paintings with a special cachet. With his extensive knowledge of Dutch art and artists, Bredius recognized that The Goldfinch was, indeed, a rare bird. The resilient puttertje had come full circle, landing about seven miles from the street in Delft where Fabritius’ studio once stood.
The painting became a popular attraction in the Mauritshuis, but by the turn of the twentieth century, people perceived The Goldfinch differently from how it had been viewed previously. In fact, every age saw itself reflected in that little bird. From antiquity to the Renaissance, the goldfinch was the embodiment of mythology, superstition, and spirituality — a symbol of Christ, death, resurrection, and other weighty ideas. In the seventeenth century, especially in the Netherlands, the goldfinch was lauded for its dedication and resourcefulness. The fact that it could learn to fetch its own food and water proved that hunger bred self-reliance, a character trait that was quintessentially Dutch. In their minds, the caged or chained goldfinch wasn’t a pathetic, little prisoner; the bird was the personification of fortitude and industriousness.
In the eighteenth century, during the Enlightenment, the pursuit of liberty ignited revolutions in France and America, and freedom became the universal catchword. Thus, the cage bird was suddenly seen as a symbol of oppression. William Cowper, one of England’s most popular poets, wrote “On a Goldfinch Starved to Death in His Cage.” In the poem, the bird recalls “Time was when I was free as air,” but now, “caught and caged, and starved to death, In dying sighs my little breath soon pass’d the wiry grate.” Instead of a plucky survivor, triumphing over adversity, the goldfinch was a victim.
Nineteenth-century writers had their own metaphorical ax to grind, and used the bird to illustrate the inhumanity associated with the Industrial Revolution. In 1843, Charles Dickens published Martin Chuzzlewitt, the novel he considered his best work. The book presented a chilling image of birds — especially a goldfinch — robbed of their freedom. Describing a character’s house he wrote: “… in every pane of glass there was at least one tiny bird in a tiny bird-cage, twittering and hopping his little ballet of despair, and knocking his head against the roof; while one unhappy goldfinch who lived outside a red villa with his name on the door, drew the water for his own drinking, and mutely appealed to some good man to drop a farthing’s-worth of poison in it.” Like his human counterparts, he was exploited by a cruel and uncaring system.
The great British author Thomas Hardy was an animal lover and activist who frequently wrote about the goldfinch in his works. In hi
s novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, his main character inadvertently causes the death of a caged goldfinch, and then suffers a similar fate, starving from the lack of love. The poem “The Caged Goldfinch” places the bird in a cemetery, establishing it as a symbol of mortality, and the poem “The Blinded Bird” condemns the vicious practice of blinding finches for the bird-singing competition known as Vinkensport. Despite condemnation from such literary luminaries as Dickens and Hardy, cage birds were so popular among Victorians that the goldfinch population was decimated, and took years to recover.
The modern perception of the goldfinch-as-victim extended to Fabritius’ painting. When Thoré described The Goldfinch to a friend, he said the bird was perched on its “case d’esclave,” or “slave cabin.” Instead of being seen as divine, or diligent, overcoming every obstacle put in its path, the painted goldfinch was now a tragic figure, held captive on its slender chain.
Somehow, Fabritius’ painting was able to express the essence of one era after another. So, it is not surprising that the painter gradually gained prominence over the centuries. “Fabritius redivivus,” proclaimed Thoré prophetically, when he predicted the resurrection of the forgotten master. By the early twenty-first century, several works by Fabritius were on display in prominent museums. His first Self-Portrait was at the Museum Boymans in Rotterdam. The Sentry, once at the Musée Napoleon in Paris, could be seen at the Mecklenburg in Germany. Fabritius’ portrait of his benefactor, Abraham de Potter — the painting with the whimsical trompe l’oeil nail painted on the canvas — was hanging in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. And both View in Delft and the second Self-Portrait were at the National Gallery in London. These paintings, together with The Goldfinch in The Hague, demonstrated that Fabritius was one of the most important, intriguing, and durable, artists of the Golden Age.
Fabritius and the Goldfinch (Kindle Single) Page 7