Why we like it - A moving tribute to the long lasting power of art, an artist adds the finishing touches to a masterpiece and moments later is killed in an explosion that ripped a city apart. Laura Cumming explores who this artist was and why his paintings are so powerful, she compellingly combines this narrative with biography of her childhood and her father, also an artist. A love letter to the Dutch Golden Age that convinces utterly.

Beautifully illustrated new memoir of a life in art, a father and daughter, and what a shared love of a painting can come to mean. 'We see with everything that we are'. On the morning of 12 October 1654, a gunpowder explosion devastated the Dutch city of Delft.

The thunderclap was heard over seventy miles away. Among the fatalities was the painter Carel Fabritius, dead at thirty-two, leaving only his haunting masterpiece The Goldfinch and barely a dozen known paintings. The explosion that killed him also buried his reputation, along with answers to the mysteries of his life and career.

What happened to Fabritius before and after this disaster is just one of the discoveries in a book that explores the relationship between art and life, interweaving the lives of Laura Cumming, her Scottish painter father, who also died too young, and the great artists of the Dutch Golden Age. This is a book about what a picture may come to mean: how it can enter your life and change your thinking in a thunderclap. Beautifully illustrated in full colour, this is the perfect Christmas gift for art lovers.