Carel Fabritius

Carel Fabritius - View of the City of Delft - 1652 - Oil on canvas, 15,4 x 31,6 cm - National Gallery, London (click photo for larger image)Dutch Baroque-era artist Carel Fabritius (1622-1654) was Rembrandt’s most outstanding student. The View of the City of Delft  (from where Johannes Vermeer also hailed) with the stall of a dealer in musical instruments suggests that Fabritius, like other contemporary Dutch painters, made use of a camera obscura. This small painting is also the only known visual evidence of the artist's famous expertise in the use of linear perspective. A man bearing some resemblance to the artist himself sits at a table beside a weathered wall. It is now generally agreed that this painting was meant to be displayed in a special viewing case or "perspective box", a distinctively Dutch art form. In addition, most scholars agree that the canvas must have been mounted originally on a bent or curved surface.