For Laura Cumming, Dutch art is a placid paradise with the countdown to a cataclysm ticking away in the background. The immaculately swept streets and waxed floors in the paintings, the thin ice that supports a crowd of skaters in a frozen winter, the churches that are containers for mellow light and silence – all are instantly annihilated by the big bang of the book’s title. The Delft Thunderclap in 1654 was the detonation of 40 tonnes of gunpowder, stored for the city’s defence in the cellar of a former convent and probably set alight by a spark when a guard turned his key in a rusty lock or swung his lantern carelessly. Buildings imploded, and numberless people were crushed by the rubble. As if still reeling from an aftershock, Cumming is left trying to balance the safety or sanctity of art against the accidental violence of life, both on that day in the 17th century and in her personal experience of rupture and irreparable loss.
Among those killed by the thunderclap was Carel Fabritius, the painter whose eerily calm A View of Delft in the National Gallery steadied Cumming during her “volatile and confused” early days in London. The book begins with her declaration of love for the painting, which she remembers visiting almost daily before she drifted off to trysts with someone she admits she did not love. Her actual boyfriend paled before Fabritius’s “darkly handsome” musician, who lolls beside his lute and viol, and Cumming wished herself out of clamorous, chaotic London into serenely empty Delft. Dutch art still consoles her by holding out the hope of “a perfectible world”. During the nervy Covid lockdowns, she kept a reproduction of Vermeer’s The Little Street pinned to a wall beside her desk as a pacifier. The apertures in Vermeer’s gabled facade invited her into “a next-door microcosm for the mind and eye”, subduing her to a stillness like that of the figure in the painting who sits hunched over some needlework inside her house.
The images Cumming studies so raptly stop time, in an “optical act” that works like hypnosis. The water in Jan van Goyen’s landscapes forgets to flow, and clouds pause above their reflections in the mirrored surface of a river. That reverie turns beatific in Vermeer’s View of Delft, where Cumming calls the stepped roofs of the houses “stairways to heaven”; even more mystically, she says that the bucket carried by a maid in a painting by Pieter de Hooch is “blessed by the sunlight”. This kind of appreciative attention slows down the flickery eye and extends its range, and as Cumming maintains her vigil she sees beyond the moment framed on the wall and glimpses a kind of eternity. The hat of a brewer in a Frans Hals portrait becomes “so large it has its own planetary halo”, while some peaches painted by Adriaen Coorte are “side-lit in deep darkness like two phases of the moon in outer space”.
In a detour, Cumming discusses the paranormal phenomenon known in the Outer Hebrides as second sight. During his time in the 1940s in a croft on the Isle of Lewis, her father, James Cumming, painted one of these prophets, a misty figure with a witch’s adder stone as his extra eye. Cumming has her own verbal equivalent to the seer’s visionary gift. Described by her, a group of prickly shells in a still life by Coorte performs a stationary ballet, and she even elicits music from the mouth of a pearly conch in the group. “The eye sees,” she says in an enchanted hush, “and it hears.”
Such magical charms fail to muffle the thunderclap, which resonates ominously throughout the book. Cumming pictures the “mushroom cloud” of dust it produced, then compares it to the collapse of the World Trade Center and to the unsafe cargo of ammonium nitrate that tore apart the Beirut port in 2020. With silent stealth, the explosion recurs in a sunburst that rendered Cumming’s daughter instantaneously colourblind, and in the unseen growth of a tumour that killed her father. But the blast is also defused and startlingly diverted into a series of aesthetic epiphanies. To compensate for the thunder, Cumming finds a “lightning strike of geometry, symmetry and sheer verticality” in an avenue of alder trees by Hobbema. Another “lightning flash” of yellow shines from a bird’s wing painted by Fabritius, and she is dazzled by Vermeer’s “pinpricks of luminous paint that crackle and glow”.
Yet Cumming keeps helplessly circling back to the stark clash between art’s composure and the catastrophe of the thunderclap, never entirely satisfied by her own quest for a “redemptive grace” that is dispensed by light and by the brushstrokes of painters. Then, on the final page, as she gazes at Fabritius’s The Goldfinch – his most tender and painful image, in which the tethered bird hops as near the end of its perch as its chain will allow – she resolves the dispute in a small miracle of perception. Her eye, probing the surface, uncovers ballistic evidence that explains why this fragile picture survived when Fabritius’s house collapsed on it. I won’t spoil the deductive climax, except to say it gives off a brilliant flash of imaginative ignition as the book’s two opposed ideas electrically connect. When I read Cumming’s last paragraph, the baleful rumble of the Delft disaster became an outburst of delighted, admiring laughter.
• Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death by Laura Cumming is published by Chatto & Windus (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
