A memoir of art and life and sudden death

This is quite a difficult book to classify and I suppose it is a memoir but not as they are conventionally conceived. For me this was a study of Dutch paintings of the 1600s with offshoots into the life of Cumming and her painter father James Cumming and the impact he had on the way she ‘sees’ paintings.

The first thunderclap in the book is the explosion of gunpowder stored in a cellar next door to where the artist Carel Fabritius, who along with everyone else in the building, died. It isn’t clear how the explosion was started – a spark from a lamp or a metal key turning in the keyhole – but the whumph was so loud it was heard 70 miles away. Fabritius was 32 years old. Sudden death. What then follows is a journey through Dutch paintings and how they have featured in Cumming’s life: a painting she visited time and time again when living in London, paintings she saw on their only family visit abroad to Amsterdam and Delft, iconic paintings but all linking back to Carel Fabritius.

What I particularly loved about this book was Cumming’s writing. She writes about paintings creating images with words and shows us that we can all look at and describe what we are seeing. For instance, she writes about Adriaen Coorte’s Still Life with Shells

For me the most startling mobilisation involves a group of shells arranged along the ledge like a corps de ballet in the footlights. They are all on tenterhooks. A long spiny shell poised on tiptoe stretches an arm out towards a dainty little red one, as if longing to touch her, or to invite a pas de deux. It’s spines tick-tack along the stone, like Prufrock’s claws at the bottom of the sea. A pearly conch sounds out its rising music. The eye sees, and it hears.

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Of course her artist father was instrumental in how Cumming saw things – as probably was her artist mother. At school she was taught that the Golden Age Dutch paintings were all about things; things that were revered and therefore needed to be recorded for posterity – look at my wealth. Her father laughed at this,

Paintings are not substitutes, he said, they are something else altogether. A likeness is never the only reason an artist paints a picture.

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I was much less convinced by other aspects of the book. Yes there are sudden deaths and it is about aspects of life but they weigh lightly in the book and feel like add-ons. But the writing about art. It is sublime.

Seeing is everything. Looking is everything. It was for him, it is for me. If I had no more speech, hearing or movement, I would still have the active life of looking; and the luxury of its replay in my dreams at night. The insatiable longing is constantly and miraculously fulfilled; pure joy, total gratitude. And art increases this looking, gives you other eyes to see with, other ways of seeing, other visions of existence. Art and artists enlarge our world.

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