Carel Fabritius, (baptized Feb. 27, 1622, Middenbeemster, Neth.—died Oct. 12, 1654, Delft), Dutch Baroque painter of portraits, genre, and narrative subjects whose concern with light and space influenced the stylistic development of the mid-17th-century school of Delft.
He was the son of a schoolmaster, who is said to have been a part-time painter, and both Carel and his brother Barent became painters; both took the name Fabritius from their original trade of carpentry (Latin faber, “carpenter”). In the early 1640s Carel Fabritius studied under Rembrandt and became one of his most significant and successful pupils. From about 1650 onward he worked in Delft and in 1652 entered the painters’ guild there. He died of injuries received when the Delft powder magazine exploded; the same explosion is thought to have destroyed many of his paintings.
The earliest work definitely attributed to Fabritius, Raising of Lazarus, is still very much in the manner of Rembrandt. But by 1648, when the portrait of Abraham de Potter (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) was painted, Fabritius’s originality and independence of spirit had already asserted itself. Unlike Rembrandt, whose figures characteristically emerge from a dark background and are modeled by the action of light, Fabritius silhouetted his figures against light backgrounds and specialized in depicting the subtlety of daylight effects; in this he influenced both Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer (who is thought to have been his pupil).
Fabritius seems to have first established a reputation for painting mural decorations with illusionistic perspective effects; A View in Delft, with a Musical Instrument Seller’s Stall (1652) may possibly reflect this type of work, for it is thought to once have been part of a peep show or a perspective box. The Goldfinch (1654) is one of his best-known works and a unique composition in the tradition of 17th-century Dutch painting. An early portrait in the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, and a late portrait, from 1654, in the National Gallery, London, usually are regarded as self-portraits.