Fabritius and the Goldfinch (Kindle Single) Read online

  FABRITIUS AND THE GOLDFINCH

  A True Story of Art, Tragedy, and Immortality

  DEBORAH DAVIS

  Copyright © 2014 by Deborah Davis

  “The Goldfinch,” Donna Tartt’s monumental novel of love, loss, and redemption, is the publishing story of the year. Like so many enthralled readers, I raced through the book and, when it ended, I was eager for more information about Tartt’s captivating little bird on a perch and the mysterious artist who put him there. Was The Goldfinch described in the book a real painting, I wondered, and did it have a history all its own? I quickly learned that it was, in fact, an actual work of art and that its story — independent of Tartt’s novel — was an epic, behind-the-canvas tale of a brilliant, doomed painter named Carel Fabritius and his greatest work.

  Fabritius, one of seventeenth-century Holland’s boldest and most talented young artists, suffered great personal tragedy and never-ending financial woes during his short life, yet he managed to turn adversity into inspiration, painting exciting, maverick works that could only be described as “modern,” especially his impressionistic and emotionally charged portrait of a chained goldfinch. And that goldfinch, from the first time Fabritius put brush to canvas in 1654, had a long and storied flight through history, from an artist’s studio in the legendary Dutch Republic at the height of its Golden Age, to a collector’s deathbed in fin-de-siècle France; from a museum in present-day New York City, to the cover of a bestselling book. Time and again, the diminutive painting, about the size of a piece of typing paper, teetered on the brink of destruction. Yet, somehow, despite disaster, disappearance, and the often cruel vicissitudes of fate, The Goldfinch endured.

  The true story of Fabritius and his Goldfinch stands on its own, inviting readers into a rich and beguiling world with compelling settings and themes. The Dutch Republic in the first half of the seventeenth century was as rich, as risk-taking, and as decadent as New York in the flamboyant eighties. The artists of the Golden Age were at the center of the culture, with fame and fortune within tantalizing reach, but only for a select few. And what about the actual goldfinch? The bird was extremely popular in Holland at the time, but was it a plaything of the rich, robbed of its freedom? Or, as some studies suggest, was it a creature that preferred captivity to life in the real world, where it, like Fabritius, would be buffeted by destiny and, ultimately, destroyed?

  Both the artist and his beloved painting would take their first step toward immortality on a seemingly ordinary day in Delft, in 1654.

  October 12, 1654

  It is a fact of life that artists never have enough money to pay the butcher, the baker or in the case of Carel Fabritius, the local innkeeper. The thirty-two-year-old painter, or schilder as it was called in his native Holland, lived brush to canvas, hand to mouth, and had fallen into the unfortunate habit of running up bills. He owed The Target, a tavern in Delft, 110 guilders for his food and drink tab, which he had sworn to pay by October 15 — November 1 at the very latest, he promised. Here it was October 12 and the debt clock was ticking. But Fabritius was optimistic about his prospects. That previous summer, the Delft Town Council had paid him 12 guilders for a painting and a few small renderings of the city’s coat of arms. Though the fee was low, Fabritius’ expectations were high: He was happy to have the approval of the town fathers, who could offer future commissions and, more importantly, good references.

  In seventeenth-century Delft, and throughout the Dutch Republic for that matter, art was a booming business. Paintings were the most accessible form of home décor, so all kinds of people — rich merchants, middle-class shopkeepers, even peasants with a few spare florins — routinely bought portraits, landscapes, still lifes, genre paintings, and histories. Among artists, competition for these customers was fierce. In the last four years alone, fifty-four new members had joined the all-powerful St. Lucas Guild — the Delft labor organization governing artists — including a promising young genre painter named Johannes Vermeer. Artists had to belong to the guild (a union as powerful as today’s teamsters), or they were forbidden to teach or sell their work in Delft. Fabritius joined as a master painter of histories in 1652, typically paying only half his dues while promising to pay the remaining 6 guilders at some unspecified point in the future.

  Joining the guild was a very wise move, because the following two years turned out to be the most productive period of his young life, and possibly the most artistic. Fabritius was exploding with fresh ideas, and approached each canvas as if it were a bold experiment, playing with perspective, color, light, texture, and subject. He was daring, even modern. Where other artists painted dark backgrounds, he covered his canvas with white. He created images that had depth and dimension, and explored the brand new technique of “trompe l’oeil,” literally tricking the eye into believing it was seeing the real thing instead of an illusion, as he did with his latest work, The Goldfinch.

  In the painting, a small bird sits on a perch, chained, casting a shadow on the pale wall behind it. The brush strokes are loose and impressionistic, the effect so real that the tiny creature appears poised to take flight. Instead of using canvas, Fabritius painted on a piece of wood. The picture was a bright addition to his studio and a constant puzzle. Though he worked on other projects, Fabritius kept coming back to The Goldfinch to make adjustments. He tried one frame, then another. He filled in the background after he put the final touches on his bird. He added another element to the goldfinch’s bird house, and then he fussed with the background a second time.

  The Goldfinch was an endlessly fascinating work-in-progress, but Fabritius had to concentrate on the painting at hand — the one that might pay his bill at the tavern and generate more assignments. He had been commissioned to do a portrait of Simon Decker, the venerable sexton from the Oude Kerk, the Old Church, in Delft. He knew exactly what do with his sitter, having painted a masterful portrait of the fifty-six-year-old Amsterdam silk merchant, Abraham de Potter, in 1649. Not that Fabritius ever did the same thing twice. He liked to challenge himself, to break rules instead of following them.

  Even his choice of where to live was a form of rebellion. Ambitious artists aspired to make names for themselves in the big, bustling metropolis of Amsterdam. Yet, in 1650, Fabritius made the decision to move to the smaller, jewel-like city of Delft. The French poet Paul Claudel marveled, “No other place exists where there is so close an intercourse between the ambient light and its painter’s vision,” describing Delft as a “poetic dreamland.” Like the other artists who lived there, Fabritius was charmed by the city’s immaculate house fronts, peaceful canals, and abundant Linden trees, and he found it to be a place of beauty, repose, and inspiration. But, at heart, he was a rebel and an outlier, so he picked a neighborhood that was a little daring. The Doelenstraat was off the beaten track, some distance away from the more fashionable town center — the equivalent of an artist living in New York’s SoHo in the 1970s, or in Brooklyn today — but the somewhat remote area had its advantages. Fabritius’ street bordered the overgrown grounds of a former convent, so his studio was quiet.

  Actually, all of Delft was quiet on this autumn Monday. Many of the townspeople had gone off to a fair in The Hague, or to the swine market in nearby Schiedam. It was a workday for Fabritius and his apprentice, Matthias Spoors. Their sitter, Simon Decker, arrived at the studio in the morning and settled into his customary pose, while Spoors mixed the day’s paints and Fabritius eyed his canvas, plotting his next strokes.

  Around 11 a.m., just as Fabritius was hitting his stride, he was distracted by a sudden flash of light in the window, brighter than any sun. A moment later, the glass shattered, followed by a
sound so loud it was deafening. Before he could process what was happening, hot smoke filled the room and the walls and the ceiling closed in on him. As he collapsed, Fabritius looked up at his beloved painting and the little goldfinch seemed — improbably — to be twisting and turning in the inferno, preparing to fly away.

  Chapter One

  Carel Fabritius was born at the center of the world. In 1622, the year of his birth, all roads led to the Dutch Republic, an alliance of seven provinces known as the Netherlands. Holland, the largest province of them all, and Fabritius’ homeland, was the economic capitol of Europe and all its colonies, the site of the first stock exchange, the richest bank, the most successful trading companies, the fastest navy. A measure of its importance was that Dutch currency, like the dollar today, was accepted all over the world. The Dutch Republic, not England or France, was the world’s first great modern nation.

  It hadn’t always been that way. For centuries, the Dutch were subjugated by their powerful neighbors in Germany and by so many other countries that the average citizen probably had a dim sense of which faraway sovereign purported to be their ruler at any given time. In 1515, the tenuous relationship between conqueror and conquered began to unravel. The last straw, from the Dutch perspective, occurred when Charles V, the King of Spain, the Holy Roman Emperor — and their current ruler — abdicated, retired to a monastery, and casually gifted the Netherlands (and the rest of his kingdom) to his deeply religious sixteen-year-old son, Philip the Prudent. Not so prudently, Philip decided to combat the rising popularity of Protestantism among the Dutch by relaunching the Inquisition, a brutal witch hunt authorizing the execution of anyone who rejected Catholicism. In 1566, the Dutch provinces united for the first time under the leadership of William the Silent to fight the Spanish and win their independence. That war lasted for the next eighty years.

  While the crafty Dutch were fighting, they were also thriving. Thanks to a robust fishing industry and domination of the international textile market, the Netherlands was already one of the richest places in the world, which was one reason Spain fought so hard to hold onto it. But in the seventeenth century, rich became super-rich. Everything the Dutch touched turned to gold. They were financial wizards who, in 1602, created the first multinational corporation — the Dutch East India Company — a government-sponsored shipping monopoly that controlled fabulously lucrative trade routes with Asia. The company was so successful that it immediately established its own stock exchange, the world’s first. The Bank of Amsterdam, the first-ever central bank, followed in 1609. Even at this early moment in banking history, the institution was clever enough to charge fees for account maintenance, withdrawals, and overdrafts.

  The secret power that enabled the Dutch to leave other countries in their dust was their mastery of water. The Dutch were “water whisperers” who tamed the seas they sailed, as well as the lakes, ponds, and rivers that covered and threatened to submerge their marshy homeland. They were brilliant mapmakers who could plot the most direct and navigable routes to the exotic places that provided coveted cargo, from spices to slaves. (Although slavery was illegal in the Netherlands, slave-trading was a legitimate offshore business). Their superior navigational skills came in handy, because the Dutch possessed the largest merchant fleet of any nation, and it consisted of ships expressly manufactured to be lighter, faster, more capacious, and less expensive than anything built by their competitors. “Through our thrifty and shrewd management we have sailed all nations off the seas,” boasted a group of proud (and presumably wealthy) Amsterdam ship owners.

  Their mastery of water abroad was unequalled, but the Dutch also faced the challenge of managing “water, water everywhere” at home. The Netherlands started out as a giant peat swamp, with large expanses of land situated below sea level, hence subject to flooding. Over the years, experts approached the problem with great ingenuity, concluding that the best way to prevent flooding was to keep their “enemy” close — to contain the water, and its power, with a system of canals and dikes.

  In 1609, a group of businessmen funded an experiment to reclaim underwater land in the Beemster, a rural area north of Amsterdam. Hydraulics engineers — their technical understanding of water management had advanced so far that the Dutch actually had hydraulics engineers — created the country’s first polder, or land reclaimed from water. Jan Adriaanszoon, later appropriately nicknamed Jan Leeghwater (“low water”), built a dike around the large Beemster lake, dug a ring canal, and used pumps powered by windmills to syphon the water into the canal. The project was such a success that its investors ended up with dry land that was fertile, habitable, and, to top it off, immensely beautiful.

  It was so beautiful that newly rich merchants in Amsterdam, much like their Wall Street counterparts in 1980’s New York, viewed Beemster as a Hamptons-like retreat. Charmed by the area’s carefully landscaped grid of verdant fields and picturesque canals, they started building castles and country estates there. The commute was easy, especially after the invention of the water coach, a passenger boat towed through the canals by horses. The Dutch Republic had so many interconnected canals that water transport became the preferred mode of travel. During a cold winter, an energetic youth much like the fabled Hans Brinker could actually skate from one city to another on the country’s extensive network of frozen canals.

  This scenic country setting was the home of Carel Fabritius, who was born in Middenbeemster, one of the new polder’s loveliest little villages, on February 27, 1622. His father, Pieter Carelsz, was the town schoolmaster, and his mother, Barbertje, was the local midwife, professions that made them prominent figures in their small community. The Dutch valued education and saw to it that even rural areas such as Middenbeemster offered its youth free schooling, a program that resulted in unusually high literacy rates throughout the country. Sixty-four percent of the population could sign their name, an exceptional number in Europe at that time.

  Pieter Carelsz was paid a respectable annual salary (with regular raises) and given a house, which also served as the village school, for his growing family. The young schoolmaster also had a creative side, which he revealed when he petitioned his employers for “permission to devote his spare time outside school to his duties as a painter.” As the art historian Frederik Duparc suggests in his work, Carel Fabritius:1622-1654, Pieter Carelsz must have been (or aspired to be), a professional artist because a hobbyist wouldn’t need official “permission” to paint on his day off.1

  Barbertje made a decent income, too. Whenever a local woman was about to begin labor, the midwife became the most important person in the life of the prospective parents and their families. The birth process was taken very seriously because the infant mortality rate was high, and what was meant to be a happy occasion could quickly turn into a funeral for the mother, baby, or, sadly, both. The midwife was present to ensure that all medical procedures and superstitions were observed properly; for example, candles had to burn with a blue flame to ward off evil spirits. If the baby survived childbirth, the midwife had the honor of presenting the newborn to its grandfather, and then to its father, receiving tips from both men to commemorate the blessed event. The midwife reigned supreme during labor and throughout the ceremonies and celebrations following the birth. The rest of the time, she served the community by dispensing rudimentary medical information. Barbertje’s knowledge and experience came in very handy in her own home, because in the years following Carel’s birth, she and Pieter Carelsz had ten more children, including their sons Barent and Johannes.

  Newly prosperous Dutch parents, whatever their economic standing, were notorious for spoiling their offspring, most of whom suffered from a seventeenth-century version of the life-style disease now called “affluenza.” After visiting the Netherlands, a disapproving French tourist said that children in the Dutch Republic were “adored and spoilt, and lived under conditions of almost total liberty.” He was shocked by the absence of discipline, and concluded that “excessive tenderness mad
e the parents incurably weak.”2 The very climate of permissiveness that seemed so inappropriate to the Frenchman made it a wonderful time to be young in Holland.

  The details of Fabritius’ upbringing are lost to history, but he was a member of this coddled generation. Typically, teenagers in the 1630s and 1640s struggled to be the opposite of authority figures, whom they perceived as somber, prudent, and too Dutch; they were likely to react to their indulgent parents with the age-old response of rebellion. Since their fathers kept their hair conservatively short and wore beards, these young men redefined masculinity by growing their hair long and shaving their faces. Hair length became a source of great public debate. Old people thought boys with shoulder-length hair looked like girls, and predicted that soon they would start acting like them. Young people, however, equated flowing locks with virility … and romance.

  Then there was the matter of dress. A proper Dutchman (with short hair and beard) wore black clothing topped off with a large white neck ruff, a collar consisting of 17 meters of finely pleated linen, creating an overall look that was neat, tailored, and sober. The next generation wanted a new look to go with its new hair, and the style they embraced was “cultivated slovenliness,” according to Benjamin B. Roberts, the author of Sex and Drugs before Rock ’n’ Roll, a study of Dutch adolescence in the seventeenth century. Fabritius and his contemporaries preferred clothes that were slouchy and colorful. For a finishing touch, they added army surplus accessories to assert their masculinity. A popular choice was the gorget, a steel collar or breastplate that was meant to be worn by soldiers, not spoiled teenagers.

  Once they were coiffed and dressed, young men turned their attention to recreation, and their choices included both old and new vices. Drinking was a perennial favorite and, to the Dutch, was a pastime that required practice. Instead of abstaining, real men were supposed to learn how to manage their consumption of beer, wine, and spirits with an expertise that could come only with frequency. Society was so tolerant of young drinkers that students (and their professors, curiously) were exempt from paying tax on alcohol. The only warning regarding excessive drinking was to avoid wijntje and trijntje, or drunkenness leading to sex — valuable advice in any century.3 But, most of the time, parents turned a blind eye to such youthful folly. Even beloved national moralist/philosopher Jacob Cats, the most widely read author in the country, supported the notion that boys will be boys, until they grow up to be men. “One has to wear out a pair of fool’s shoes before one can be wise,” he said tolerantly.