Laura Cumming’s ‘Thunderclap’ is a very personal collection of connected essays about the so-called Golden Age of Dutch Art, her Scottish father’s life as an artist, and her own relationship to art and viewing it. Captivated at an early age by the work of Carel Fabritius, whom she characterizes as “the missing link” between Rembrandt and Vermeer for many art historians, Cumming focuses on lesser known Dutch Renaissance artists like Fabritius, Gerard Ter Borch, Rachel Ruysch, Adriaen Coorte, Emanuel de Witte, and my new favorite, Pieter de Hooch. Less than a dozen of Fabritius’s paintings survive, which adds to the mystery of this accomplished artist, who was killed at age 32 by the “thunderclap” of the title, when the gunpowder stores of Delft exploded in 1654. Cumming does a fascinating job of recreating the artistic world of seventeenth-century Delft and Amsterdam, where “somewhere between 1.3 and 1.4 million paintings were produced by between 600 and 700 painters” in about 20 years (129). Her larger point, however, is inspiring in the reader a reverence and respect for the arts, and the millions of artists past and present, who work against odds to help us reach our fullest potential as humans. A beautiful book, with illustrations (but I still looked for many of these artists on the internet).