La sentinella

Carel Fabritius signed and dated this in 1654, the last year of his life. That October a gunpowder store in Delft blew up in a blast heard many miles away, flattening a quarter of the town and killing him in his studio at the age of 32. Only about a dozen of his paintings survive. This is one of them, a soldier who has sunk down half-asleep by a wall, fumbling with his musket while his dog waits and a carved stone lion looks down from the arch above him. Nothing much is happening, and that is rather the point of it, an ordinary man caught off his guard in the warm light. A cleaning in 2004 found that Fabritius had painted out a second soldier who once stood in the scene.