Moreover, it was once covered by a gilded frame, attached with 10 nails. The panel was probably sawn from a larger piece of wood. Technical analysis of The Goldfinch, conducted in 2003 ahead of an exhibition about Fabritius at the Mauritshuis, provided tantalising results. (That said, Gordenker tells me: “I have never encountered an artist who can paint a white wall so eloquently.”) But everything else about the picture is surprisingly bare: the simple feeding-box is unadorned, except for a couple of semi-circular bars, while the plastered wall in the background is entirely blank, serving to enhance the drama of the shadow cast by the bright light in the picture. Yes, the bird is chained – a detail which meant that, in other Dutch paintings, they could be symbols of captive love. One striking aspect of The Goldfinch is the simplicity, even austerity, of the composition. And when you combine that with the incredibly vivacious painting technique, you get something unprecedented.” But to see one isolated in this way is revelatory. Before Fabritius, you find birds in genre paintings and landscapes, as well as dead birds in still lives.

“But what’s unusual about Fabritius’s painting,” continues Gordenker, “is that it is, as it were, a portrait. “So they were very popular pets.” Occasionally, goldfinches, along with elaborate bird-houses, appear in 17th Century Dutch paintings by, for instance, Gerrit Dou (1613-75).

“They are intelligent birds and they sing beautifully, especially the males,” explains Emilie Gordenker, director of the Mauritshuis. Even simple questions about it prove impossible to answer definitively, such as why did Fabritius paint it? How was it originally displayed? And what, if anything, did it mean?

The thing is, the more we think about The Goldfinch, and try to understand it within the context of 17th-Century Dutch art, the more mysterious it becomes.

Because of Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Fabritius’s Goldfinch is now more famous than ever. Her bestselling, 800-page Bildungsroman, published in 2013, is narrated by a character who, as a 13-year-old boy, walks off with the painting in the chaos following a terrorist attack on the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it is part of a temporary exhibition of Dutch masterpieces. Moreover, of course, it recently inspired Donna Tartt’s novel of the same name. Whatever the truth about Fabritius’s relationship with Vermeer, what is certain is that, today, The Goldfinch is one of the most celebrated paintings in the permanent collection of the Mauritshuis in The Hague – second in terms of popularity, probably, only to Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring.

The goldfinch book synopsis