The Engagement of Carel Fabritius's Goldfinch of 1654 With the Dutch Window, A Significant Site of Neighborhood Social Exchange
View/ Open
Issue Date
2016Author
Stone-Ferrier, Linda
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
Published Version
http://www.jhna.org/index.php/vol-8-1-2016/325-stone-ferrierMetadata
Show full item recordAbstract
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.
Collections
Citation
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
Items in KU ScholarWorks are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.
We want to hear from you! Please share your stories about how Open Access to this item benefits YOU.