Carel Fabritius

The painter Carel Fabritius was part of the Dutch Golden Age and one of Rembrandt’s only students to develop a unique painting style. Fabritius’ works can be recognized by their soft, light, and harmonious color palettes, which contrast the dark chiaroscuro championed by his teacher. His experiments with exaggerated perspective and heavy applications of paint layers most likely influenced the master of the next generation of the Dutch Golden Age, Johannes Vermeer. Fabritius died and most of his works were destroyed when a gunpowder store exploded in Delft. Donna Tartt’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Goldfinch centers around a man who, as a young boy, grabbed Fabritius’ painting of the same name when escaping a fictional explosion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.