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Nonfiction Books » Art » Art History

Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death by Laura Cumming
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Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death

by Laura Cumming

Recommendations from our site

“It examines the life and work of Carel Fabritius, the 17th-century Dutch artist – who painted ‘The Goldfinch’, among other things. He actually only left just over a dozen paintings, and has been under-recognised in assessments of the Golden Age of Art. But it’s also an examination of Cumming’s own father’s work – James Cumming, an artist in his own right. The two disparate stories are drawn together, I suppose, by what one might call memoir. There’s a connection, which is Laura herself. It’s a work of admiration of both people, and it has this incredible structure which unfurls and pulls in all manner of things along the way.” Read more...

Recent Nonfiction Highlights: The 2024 Women’s Prize Shortlist

Suzannah Lipscomb, Historian

Other books by Laura Cumming

Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child by Laura Cumming

Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child
by Laura Cumming

On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons by Laura Cumming

On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons
by Laura Cumming

Our most recommended books

  • The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art
    by Joseph Leo Koerner

  • Ways of Seeing
    by John Berger

  • The Lives of the Artists
    by Giorgio Vasari

  • The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
    by Benvenuto Cellini

  • Drawing and Painting

    The Journal of Eugene Delacroix
    by Eugene Delacroix

  • Francis Bacon’s Gilded Gutter Life
    by Daniel Farson

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