Carel Fabritius

On the 12th of October 1654 the Delft gunpowder store went up, killing over a hundred people and flattening a quarter of the Dutch town. One of the dead was Carel Fabritius, a painter of 32 whose studio and most of his pictures were destroyed in the same blast. Fewer than a dozen of his works survive.

He had trained in Amsterdam under Rembrandt, the towering figure of the Dutch Golden Age, and was probably his most gifted pupil. But he moved away from his teacher's deep shadows toward something cooler and stranger. He liked to set a dark figure against a light wall, the reverse of the usual habit, and he played with optics and perspective in a way that points straight toward Johannes Vermeer, the Delft master who came just after him.

The one picture most people now know is The Goldfinch, painted the year he died. It is small, barely bigger than a sheet of paper, and shows a real bird chained by one leg to its feeding box on a wall. He signed and dated it 1654, so it was in or near his studio when the powder went off.