Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Carel Fabritius
Dutch; 17th-century
The Hague, The Netherlands: Mauritshuis
84%
The Goldfinch. 1654. Oil on canvas
This may be the greatest trompe l'oeil painting ever made, and that's because of the way it seems only to inhabit this genre so as to undercut its principles, thereby asserting a fundamentally painterly effect. The finch itself is the key player in this process: living things contradict trompe l'oeil's illusionism as such. By implying movement but failing ever to move, they kill the trick before it begins. But besides this, there are other smaller and, ultimately, more substantial departures from convention that place this painting on a very high artistic level. The strands of thin impasto running along the feeder's curved bars, which cause light to glance intricately across the surface but which also have the quality, from up close, of pure weighty paint; the doubling of the bird's yellow wing in that swatch of grey that's below it and to the right, which implies a poetic affinity between things seen and the means by which they're made visible; the spongy, variegated appearance of the wall, which, in terms of facture, goes beyond what's necessary for the illusion and nearly enters into abstractness; the shadow at right, which concentrates the whole scene into a single fluid patch. (TFS, 2026)