WINNER OF THE SALTIRE BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2024WINNER OF THE WRITERS PRIZE 2024 NONFICTIONSHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMENS PRIZE FOR NONFICTION 2024A 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 KnightOn 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 thirtytwo 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 seventeenthcentury Delft to twentiethcentury Scottish islands from Rembrandts 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 TelegraphA book that often borders on the sublime in its sentiment and beauty Sunday Times