Page:Hofstede de Groot catalogue raisonné, Volume 1, 1908.djvu/596

 57 2 CAREL FABRITIUS SECT. debtor of Jasper de Potter, in Delft. On August 9, 1653, he witnessed an acknowledgment of a debt for the painter Egbert van der Poel, in Delft. On September 24, 1654, he was himself again in want of money. He was stricken .down on October 12, 1654, at the moment when he was painting a portrait of the sexton Simon Decker. Six or seven hours after the explosion he was rescued from the ruins ; he was still living, but died soon after. On October 14 he was buried in the Oude Kerk, at Delft. He gained a posthumous reputation through the verses published in memory of him by the bookseller Arnold Bon, to which reference will be made in the biography of Vermeer. Fabritius's widow, in signing an acknowledgment of debt on February 25, 1655, described her late husband as painter to the Prince of Orange. That Fabritius was a serious and cultivated artist may be seen quite apart from his works in the conversation of Rembrandt's pupils on art which is reported by Hoogstraten. One need not doubt that Fabritius was a pupil of Rembrandt, although a comparison of his known works with those painted by Rembrandt about 1640 shows hardly any points of contact in style. The portrait of De Notte is the earliest existing work by Fabritius ; it shows him as a mature painter, whose artistic method, especially in the treatment of light, was the direct opposite of Rembrandt's. For Rembrandt in his portraits causes the heads to shine out from a back- ground that is either dark or in strong chiaroscuro ; Fabritius, on the other hand, makes his heads dark on a light background, in accordance with the artistic manner of Vermeer. The light is that of a bright day, in which the modelling is given without vivid contrasts of shadow. The same principle of dark on light is expressed in Fabritius's genre-pieces, which in regard to their subjects also betray an artist who differed widely in temperament from Rembrandt. The four dated pictures by Fabritius do not enable us to reconstruct his artistic development. We can form no idea of the architectural perspectives, which are so highly praised by Hoogstraten, and to which the artist chiefly owed his reputation. But the pictures still in existence suffice to prove that Fabritius, though he died prematurely, was an artist of the very first rank. The three genre-pieces at Schwerin, at Innsbruck, and in Sir William Eden's collection at Ferry Hill, the " Goldfinch "unique in Dutch art at the Mauritshuis, and the three portraits at Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and St. Petersburg, afford evidence enough that Fabritius is deserving to be named in the same breath with Rembrandt his master, and with Johannes Vermeer his great pupil. A CLASSIFIED SUMMARY OF THE CONTENTS I. RELIGIOUS SUBJECTS, 1-2. VI. STILL LIFE, 16-17. II. MYTHOLOGY, 3. VII. INTERIOR, 18. III. GENRE-PIECES, 4-5/7. VIII. LANDSCAPE, 19. IV. PORTRAITS, 6-15. IX. UNDESCRIBED PICTURES, lya-i V. ANIMALS, 16.