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The Engagement of Carel Fabritius's Goldfinch of 1654 With the Dutch Window, A Significant Site of Neighborhood Social Exchange
Stone-Ferrier, Linda
Stone-Ferrier, Linda
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Abstract
This article posits that Carel Fabritius’s illusionistic painting The Goldfinch, 1654, cleverly traded on the experience of a passerby standing on an actual neighborhood street before a household window. In daily discourse, the window functioned as a significant site of neighborhood social exchange and social control, which official neighborhood regulations mandated. I suggest that Fabritius’s panel engaged the window’s prominent role in two possible ways. First, the trompe l’oeil painting may have been affixed to the inner jamb of an actual street-side window, where goldfinches frequently perched in both paintings and in contemporary households. Second, at another point in time, The Goldfinch appears to have functioned as a hinged protective shutter attached to an interior painting of possibly a domestic scene. Together with the encased picture, Fabritius’s panel would have hung on a household wall. In such a capacity, The Goldfinch would have evoked the viewer’s inquisitiveness, as if he or she were a passerby on a neighborhood street before an actual domestic window with an alternatively open and closed shutter.
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2016
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Stone-Ferrier, Linda. "The Engagement of Carel Fabritius' Goldfinch 1654 with the Dutch Window, a Significant Site of Neighborhood Social Exchange." Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art JHNA 8.1 (2015): n. pag. doi:10.5092/jhna.2016.8.1.5