ONE of the most famous paintings in the world is already ruffling a few feathers before its historic visit to Scotland.
The Goldfinch, the masterpiece by Dutch artist Carel Fabritius, and the subject of Donna Tartt’s lauded novel of the same name, is to be displayed in Scotland for the first time next month.
When it was last shown outside the Netherlands at the Frick Collection in New York in 2014, it was seen by a record-breaking 200,000 people.
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The National Galleries of Scotland is loaning it from the Mauritshuis in The Hague to display it at the Scottish National Gallery.
However, while it is not expecting a similiar number of viewers, it has already been heartened by responses to expect an “immensely popular display”.
Tickets for an event to discuss the painting, which will be in Edinburgh from November 4 to December 18, sold out in eight minutes.
A second event has now been added to “accommodate the great demand”, at the gallery’s lecture theatre.
Both events, for official friends of the gallery, have proved so popular there are now more than 200 names on the waiting list.
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The event is a free exhibition with no tickets required. As such, the galleries said it will be difficult to collate an exact number of visitors to the show.
A spokesman added: “Our expectations combined with the great social media engagement and ticket demand suggests it will be an immensely popular display.”
The Goldfinch, painted in 1654 during the Golden Age of Dutch art, will be on loan to the Scottish National Gallery for six weeks.
The Goldfinch was the title of the third novel by American author Donna Tartt, also creator of The Secret History, and was her first new book in 11 years.
It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014 and concerns the tale of Theodore Decker who, at the age of 13, survives a terrorist bombing at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, in which his mother is killed.
Surviving the blast, he takes with him The Goldfinch, which proves a driving force throughout the rest of the novel.
The Goldfinch is one of only a handful of works by Fabritius known to exist. Fabritius (1622-1654) is now regarded as a link between two giants of Dutch painting: Rembrandt van Rijn, for whom he was a star pupil, and Johannes Vermeer, on whose work he had influence.His life was cut tragically short, at the age of 32, when the main gunpowder arsenal in Delft, where he lived, exploded, killing hundreds of the city’s residents, including the young painter.
The Goldfinch has been exhibited in the UK on a handful of occasions.
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The painting is small, measuring 33.5 x 22.8cm and is painted in oil on wooden panel.
The work is so vivid and exquisitely painted that it is speculated that Fabritius intended to fool the eye into seeing the image as a living bird, rather than a representation.
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