In 1654 a gunpowder store exploded in Delft, taking a quarter of the city with it. The cause was carelessness rather than anything sinister, unless you were a particularly keen member of the strict Dutch Reformed Church, in which case you might believe that God was coming for you. Most likely a cack-handed caretaker let a spark fly from his lantern, and the whole thing went up in a bang you could hear 70 miles away.

The loss was immeasurable. Just think of all those luminously beautiful interiors that we know from the paintings of the Dutch masters, with their snowy tablecloths, jugs of milk, dozing dogs and serene maidservants. Now imagine them all smashed to smithereens.

For Laura Cumming, one loss has always been felt more keenly than the others. One of the buildings nearest the centre of the blast was the studio of the artist Carel Fabritius, who painted some of the most beautiful and enigmatic pictures of the mid-17th century. When the small room went up, it took with it Fabritius, his assistant, his mother-in‑law and the local dignitary who was sitting for a portrait at a time.

Who knows how many of his extraordinary paintings were destroyed. Only about a dozen of Fabritius’s pictures are extant, including The Goldfinch (made famous through Donna Tartt’s novel and subsequent film, although Cumming never mentions this) and A View of Delft, an extraordinary study of a scene from his studio that appears to make straight lines bend. It is through these warping streets that the injured and dying were ferried to the makeshift hospital, including Fabritius himself, who died a few hours after being pulled from the wreckage.

Cumming explains that she first developed proprietorial feelings about Fabritius when, as a young woman doing her first job in London, she would pop in to see A View of Delft, which hangs in the National Gallery. It wasn’t the striking perspective that drew her so much as the fact that in the corner of the painting, under a shady awning, sat a young seller of musical instruments alongside a shining lute and curly viola. Still and intent, darkly handsome, here was exactly the sort of painted man from history on whom a clever girl might have a crush. Fabritius modelled the music man on himself.

Since Fabritius’s surviving output was so small and his biographical details so slight (not least because he was only 32 when he died), he has tended to be used as a handy narrative staging post. More specifically he has been identified as the missing link between Rembrandt, in whose studio he was briefly an apprentice, and Vermeer, the slightly younger hero of the Dutch golden age, who lived a couple of streets away and narrowly avoided being blown up too. At the time of his own death decades later, Vermeer was found to have three paintings by Fabritius in his studio.

Cumming, who is chief art critic of the Observer, learned her love of the Dutch golden age from her father, the postwar Scottish artist James Cumming. She wraps a story of growing up with him and his singular eye into her later passion for Carel Fabritius. Cumming learned from her dad to rebut the patronising but enduring idea that Dutch realism flourished in the 17th century because all those dull, prosperous burghers demanded an art that was strictly representational, a one-to-one account of the stuff they had managed to acquire. “Paintings are not substitutes,” Cumming tells his young daughter. “They are something else altogether. A likeness is never the only reason an artist paints a picture.”

But nor is painting a trick. Cumming is particularly short-tempered with those art historians who have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to prove that A View of Delft is nothing more than Fabritius experimenting with perspective. There’s some evidence to suggest that the painting may have been designed to be viewed through one of the new-fangled mirrored boxes which would allow the warp of the image to resolve itself into a brilliant 3D effect. Clever optics were all the rage in ingenious Delft. But so what, asks Cumming, who prefers instead to think about how the painting, no more than 12in wide, insinuates itself into our imaginative life, inviting us to cross the hallucinatory bridge into the unknown world that lies beyond.

Cumming writes with the sureness of carefully laid paint. This is not art historical scholarship of the academic kind – there are no footnotes or references to sources beyond her own feelings and intuition. It is an emotionally informed approach to art, always paying attention to the fact that each person’s vision is different (one of her daughters goes colour-blind as she is writing this book, having stared too long at the sun). Cumming cannot in truth show us new definitive facts about Carel Fabritius, but she brings him out of the shadows, making us see why he is so much more than the missing link in someone else’s story.

• Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life & Sudden Death by Laura Cumming is published by Chatto & Windus (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.