Carel Fabritius

Carel Fabritius was Rembrandt’s most gifted pupil, and the one who turned his lessons upside down. Instead of figures emerging from darkness, he set his subjects against pale, light walls, with cool colour and inventive tricks of perspective.

He was born in Middenbeemster in 1622, worked in Rembrandt’s Amsterdam studio in the early 1640s and later settled in Delft. He died there in 1654, aged 32, when a gunpowder store exploded and destroyed much of the town, along with his studio. Only about a dozen of his paintings survive, among them The Goldfinch in the Mauritshuis in The Hague and A View of Delft in the National Gallery, London.

A View of Delft, with its stretched, curving street, was probably made for a perspective box, and shows how interested he was in the way we see space.