Portrait of the weekCulture This article is more than 23 years oldSelf-portrait, Carel Fabritius (1654)
This article is more than 23 years oldArtist: Carel Fabritius (1622-1654), Rembrandt's greatest pupil. After training in Rembrandt's studio in the early 1640s, he moved to Delft in 1650 and did illusionistic murals and views of the city that experiment with strange perspectives and feature lonely, desolate characters. He was the most promising artist in a city where Pieter de Hooch and Jan Steen were also at work. He was young, gifted and had connections with the court of Orange. But at 10.30am on October 12, 1654, the gunpowder magazine of Delft exploded, leaving a vast, water-filled crater and devastating a large section of the city. The 32-year-old Fabritius was among the dead.
Subject: The uncompromising way he looks at us and the experimental nature of this painting make it almost certain this is a self-portrait. Rembrandt painted several self-portraits in which he affected military dress, and his former pupil seems to be playing the same game here.
Distinguishing features: He might be studying himself in the mirror, there's such a critical, mocking acuteness to those big, dark eyes, an honesty about who he is - the unshaven, creased lower cheek, the unkempt hair under the fine woolly hat - that makes the military armour he is wearing ironic. We don't think for one minute he's a soldier. He's a young man adopting armour as a badge of dashing ways and perhaps also as an assertion of the nobility of art: the artist as hero. His eyebrows flare furiously and his gaze is intense; you can't look back for long.
This is the self isolated, framed alone in space, and heightened by the setting of a storm-threatening sky, which was very unusual in 17th-century art. Out of the heavens, this picture suggests, a turbulent rainstorm, a bolt of lightning might come at any moment. And the same is true of the young man in armour, whose martial dress signifies rage and violence. He's a passionate man, a tempestuous soul full of energy.
It's impossible to look at this painting without mournful hindsight. It is signed and dated C Fabritius 1654, so it must have been painted, at the most, months before his death. There is a painting, also in the National Gallery, by the Delft painter Egbert van der Poel of the scene just after the explosion. It shows a space cleared of houses, with nothing but dirt, water and broken timbers. Houses are shells, the sky is as tumultuous as that in Fabritius's self-portrait, and in the foreground survivors are pulled clear of the rubble, while corpses - perhaps Fabritius among them - are wrapped in canvas shrouds. Van der Poel did 12 versions, so there must have been a demand for what appears to be an eyewitness record of the horror.
Fabritius's death was regarded by contemporaries as a tragedy - he was the most talented of Rembrandt's pupils. This self-portrait proves he was special. It is not in the least derivative of Rembrandt: Fabritius has a very distinctive, pale palette and a sparse, rigorous dryness completely different from Rembrandt's dark luxury. Yet, as in a Rembrandt portrait, you feel this is not just paint on canvas, but a real, rather astringent human mind confronting you.
Inspirations and influences: Fabritius was most famous for his murals, which were said to perfectly deceive the eye with their perspective realism. His extant paintings - especially his View of the City of Delft (1652) in the National Gallery - deploy disconcerting, panoramic trick perspectives and seem to have been connected to the optical experiments that fascinated the 17th-century Dutch, including Jan Vermeer, who probably used a camera obscura for his interior views. Vermeer, also a Delft artist, owned paintings by Fabritius. The biggest influence Fabritius had on Vermeer is the emotional texture of his painting, which is seen in this self-portrait as well as his nearly empty cityscapes: a melancholia and a reticence.
Where is it? The National Gallery, London WC2 (020-7747 2885).
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