Fabritius, Carel

Fabritius, Carel (kär`əl fäbrēt`sēs), 1622–54, Dutch painter; pupil and outstanding follower of Rembrandt. His early death in the explosion of a powder magazine at Delft cut short a career of great promise. Among his few remarkable works are Portrait of a Man (Rotterdam); The Goldfinch (The Hague); and View of Delft (National Gall., London). He is thought to have had a strong influence on Vermeer. His brother

Barent Fabritius (bär`ənt), 1624–73, worked in a similar though less accomplished manner, influenced by Maes as well as Rembrandt. Barent's portrait of the Van der Helm family (1655) is in the Rijks Museum.

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Fabritius, Carel

(baptized Feb. 27, 1622, Middenbeemster, Neth.—died Oct. 12, 1654, Delft) Dutch painter. He studied with Rembrandt in the early 1640s, then settled in Delft, entering its painters' guild in 1652. The earliest work attributed to him, The Raising of Lazarus (c. 1645), was strongly influenced by Rembrandt, but he soon developed a personal Baroque style marked by cool colour harmonies, subtle lighting effects, and illusionistic perspective. His portraits and his genre and narrative paintings influenced Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer. All but about a dozen of his paintings were destroyed by an explosion of the Delft powder magazine, which killed him as well.