![]() ![]() Theo's father having deserted the family, Theo is for a while looked after by the wealthy parents of a school acquaintance, later being claimed when his father reappears and takes him to a haphazard life in Las Vegas. Somehow, even shrouded and entombed in the storage locker, it had worked itself free and into some fraudulent public narrative, a radiance that glowed in the mind of the world." To think of it wrapped and sealed uptown make me feel self-erased, blanked-out, as if burying it away had only increased its power and given it a more vital and terrible form. In real life it's safely in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, but in Tartt's novel the painting is taken by Theo who for various reasons keeps it, the secrecy weighing heavy on him: "How had I ever thought I would keep it hidden? I'd meant to deal with the painting for years, get it back where it belonged, and yet somehow I had kept on and on finding reasons not to. That Fabritius painted it in the year of his death adds poignancy. It's a small trompe l'oeil painting showing a beautiful but pitiable finch chained by one leg to a wall-mounted box: kept as a pet or ornament, suffering, unable to escape. Fabritius was himself killed in a gunpowder explosion at the age of 32, and The Goldfinch (Het puttertje in Dutch) may have been in his workshop at the time. ![]() ![]() The painting's totemic significance stays with us to the end, prompting meditations on the meaning of art, the power of communication, and the sense of loss. ![]()
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