Portrait of Abraham de Potter

Carel Fabritius painted this in 1649, the year before he moved to Delft, a move that would end up killing him. In 1654 the city's gunpowder magazine exploded and took a whole quarter of Delft with it, Fabritius among the dead, and most of his paintings were lost too. Fewer than a dozen survive. This one shows Abraham de Potter, an Amsterdam silk merchant and an old friend of the painter's family, standing against a bare, weathered wall with none of the drama his teacher Rembrandt loved. Look just above the signature and you will find a small nail painted to jut out from the plaster, so convincing you want to reach for it.