How to Read Paintings: The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius
A beautiful and mysterious depiction of a captive bird
We look up. Slightly above eye level we see an exotic looking bird perched on a feeder-box. The bird has lemon-yellow and cherry-red highlights, and is tethered to the feeder by a fine metal chain. It has some chance of movement, for the length of the chain is perhaps twice the height of the bird, and moreover its loop is allowed to slide left and right along the metal bar.
We can begin to imagine the bird taking flight, if only momentarily. It will flutter, perhaps hold a position in mid-air like a hummingbird, before it must — by the logic of its captivity — return to its place on the perch.
The artist who painted this intriguing image was Carel Fabritius, a Dutch artist who lived through the so-called Golden Age of Dutch art of the 17th century. He spent time studying in the studio of Rembrandt and later moved to the city of Delft where Johannes Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch both lived and worked.
Delft was also to be the city in which Fabritius died, and suddenly too: in 1654 an enormous explosion in the Delft…
