Laura Cumming - sponsored privately

Chief art critic of The Observer since 1999, Laura Cumming was shortlisted for the Costa prize for her memoir, On Chapel Sands. Now she has ingeniously brought together memoir with her passion for art in Thunderclap. In this she pursues her enthusiasm for the little known Dutch Golden Age painter, Carel Fabritius who left us The Goldfinch but died young in an explosion. She also shares her relationship with her father, the Scottish artist James Cumming, who had his own deep connection to Dutch painting, and who taught her about colour, light and the rewards of looking deeply. This is a book about what a picture may come to mean: how it can enter your life and change your thinking in a thunderclap, a sudden clarity of sight. It is about the precariousness of human life - the way it may be snatched from us in an instant. What can art do to sustain us? Laura will be in conversation with the novelist, Patrick Gale.