Carel Fabritius and The Goldfinch

'The Goldfinch' (1654) by Carel Fabritius; Mauritshuis,
The Hague

This is one of the paintings that I come back to every time I visit the Mauritshuis in The Hague. It is small in size, you can easily miss it, but it is beautiful in simplicity and colour. The painter is Carel Fabritius, baptised on the 27th of February, 1622, and a pupil of Rembrandt. He was one of his most promising students and the only one to develop his own style. While other students of Rembrandt applied chiaroscuro, the paintings of Fabritius have an overall brightness. 'The Goldfinch' is a good example of this. Fabritius died at the early age of 32, on 12 October 1654, in a gunpowder explosion in Delft, which destroyed a quarter of the city and many of his paintings. Fabritius was a great influence on Johannes Vermeer.