'The Picture That Imprisons It'

Memory is adhesive. Sub-memories adhere to it like lint on a suit. Take The Goldfinch, Carel Fabritius’ 1654 painting. I first saw it in 1974 when it served as the cover image for Osip Mandelstam’s Selected Poems, published by Macmillan and translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin. When New York Review Books reprinted the collection in 2004, they retained the painting on the cover. I wrote about it twelve years ago. In A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), Laurence Sterne devotes three chapters to a caged starling that reminds me of Fabritius’ goldfinch each time I read the novel. In “The Nonheroic Subject,” an essay in Still Life with a Bridle (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter, 1991), Zbigniew Herbert addresses the Golden Age of Dutch painting, the seventeenth century. Without mentioning Fabritius he writes of that time and place:

“[T]here is no division in their art between what is great and what is small, what is important and unimportant, elevated and ordinary. They painted apples and the portraits of fabric shopkeepers, pewter plates and tulips, with such patience and such love that the images of other worlds and noisy tales about earthly triumphs fade in comparison.”

The painting of a bird chained to a shelf has a power beyond its humble subject. Now I discover the English novelist Brigid Brophy (1929-1995) collected the essay “Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius” in Reads (1989). The paperback edition published by Cardinal (yet another bird) includes Fabritius’ painting on the cover. The only book by Brophy I have read is Prancing Novelist (1973), her critical biography of Ronald Firbank. Her essays are pleasantly wayward and contrarian. She seems to have had little respect for “house style,” bless her. The essay begins: “The small painting of a goldfinch by Carel Fabritius is one of the world’s memorable pictures: simple in the extreme yet deeply enigmatic.” She asks an art-historical question: “Is the picture a portrait?” and answers in a non-art-historical manner:

“The question, to which I think the answer is almost certainly ‘Yes!,’ is no whimsy. I was for some years on terms of talk-and-touch friendship with several wild and free urban pigeons. I learned what I imagine better-versed humans have always known: out of dozens of the same species you recognise the birds you are acquainted with exactly as you recognise your human acquaintances in a crowded room – by the individual cast of their faces.”

All true for those who pay attention, but hardly typical art criticism. I like it when a writer does something unconventional – e.g., talking to pigeons – but doesn’t make a big deal out of it and shifts the focus away from herself. Brophy was what we would today call an animal rights advocate. Such people range in temperament from the compassionately thoughtful to the clinically insane. Brophy once described herself as “seared by the cruelty and injustice humans inflict on their fellow animals.” In her Goldfinch essay, Brophy gives a brief history of bird enslavement. It seems like a genuinely nasty and unrewarding practice. She speculates interestingly and learnedly on the purpose of the painting, its functions and meaning, which are too complicated to briefly explain here but involve the amusement and instruction of an orphan boy. Do read the essay. For Brophy, Fabritius is a sort hero. She concludes:

“Masterly painter, schoolmaster, abused bird and instructed boy are all dead. The image abides, posing mechanistic puzzles, which one can try to answer by logical conjecture, and presenting the insoluble and almost unbearable enigma of the existence, once, of a captive bird and the existence, now, of the image of the bird looking out from the picture that imprisons it.”