Bøker av Laura Cumming

**WINNER OF THE WRITERS' PRIZE (NON-FICTION CATEGORY)****SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024**'A wonderful read (or a great present) for anyone who loves stories and art' Nina Stibbe, author of Love, NinaA 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.'We see with everything that we are'On the morning of 12 October 1654, a gunpowder explosion devastated the Dutch city of Delft. The thunderclap was heard over seventy miles away. Among the fatalities was the painter Carel Fabritius, dead at thirty-two, leaving only his haunting masterpiece The Goldfinch and barely a dozen known paintings. The explosion that killed him also buried his reputation, along with answers to the mysteries of his life and career.What happened to Fabritius before and after this disaster is just one of the discoveries in a book that explores the relationship between art and life, interweaving the lives of Laura Cumming, her Scottish painter father, who also died too young, and the great artists of the Dutch Golden Age.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.**A SUNDAY TIMES, DAILY EXPRESS AND GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023**'Brilliant ... rush out and buy it' Edmund de Waal, bestselling author of The Hare with Amber Eyes

From the Sunday Times-bestselling author of On Chapel Sands, shortlisted for the Costa Prize for Biography'No one writes art like Laura Cumming' Philip Hoare, author of Albert and the Whale'I will never look at any painting in the same way again' Polly Morland, author of A Fortunate Woman_____________________'We see with everything that we are'On the morning of 12 October 1654, in the Dutch city of Delft, a sudden explosion was followed by a thunderclap that could be heard more than seventy miles away. Carel Fabritius - now known across the world for his exquisite painting, The Goldfinch - had been at work in his studio. He, along with many others, would not survive the day.In Thunderclap, Laura Cumming reveals her passion for the art of the Dutch Golden Age and her determination to lift up the reputation of Fabritius. She reveals the Netherlands, where - wandering the narrow streets of Amsterdam, driving across the flatlands, or pausing at a quiet waterfront - she encounters the rich reality behind the shining beauty of Vermeer and Rembrandt, Hals and de Hooch. She shares too her relationship with her father, the Scottish artist James Cumming, who had his own deep connection to Dutch painting, and who taught her about colour, light and the rewards of looking deeply.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, a sudden clarity of sight. This is also a book about the precariousness of human life - the way it may be snatched from us in an instant. What can art do to sustain us? The work that survives tells its own compelling story in these pages.

In 1845, a Reading bookseller came across the portrait of a prince at a country house auction. Suspecting that it might be a long-lost Velazquez, he bought the picture and set out to discover its strange history - a quest that led from fame to ruin and exile. This book shows how and why great works of art can affect us, even to the point of mania.

Focusing on the art of self-portraiture, this effortlessly engaging exploration of the lives of artists sheds fascinating light on some of the most extraordinary portraits in art history.Self-portraits catch your eye. They seem to do it deliberately. Walk into any art gallery and they draw attention to themselves. Come across them in the world's museums and you get a strange shock of recognition, rather like glimpsing your own reflection. For in picturing themselves artists reveal something far deeper than their own physical looks: the truth about how they hope to be viewed by the world, and how they wish to see themselves.In this beautifully written and lavishly illustrated book, Laura Cumming, art critic of the Observer, investigates the drama of the self-portrait, from Durer, Rembrandt and Velazquez to Munch, Picasso, Warhol and the present day. She considers how and why self-portraits look as they do and what they reveal about the artist's innermost sense of self - as well as the curious ways in which they may imitate our behaviour in real life.Drawing on art, literature, history, philosophy and biography to examine the creative process in an entirely fresh way, Cumming offers a riveting insight into the intimate truths and elaborate fictions of self-portraiture and the lives of those who practise it. A work of remarkable depth, scope and power, this is a book for anyone who has ever wondered about the strange dichotomy between the innermost self and the self we choose to present for posterity - our face to the world.