Last time I wrote about the goldfinch, I cut something out. The essay was about a bird whose body had been shaped around thistle seed heads: a thin, pointed bill that works like tweezers, pulling seed out of heads that stronger-billed birds can’t get into. I’d also found a painting, and it pulled the essay off course, so I set it aside. I’ve come back to it because I think I now see what it was actually about.

The painting is Carel Fabritius’s The Goldfinch, from 1654. It’s small, about 33 by 23 centimetres, and the bird in it is life-size. It sits on the top ring of a little wall-mounted feeding box against a pale plaster wall. If you look at its leg, there’s a fine chain running down to the box. The bird is tethered to where it lives.

In Dutch the painting is called Het puttertje, and that word is what I missed the first time. Putter is a common Dutch name for the goldfinch, and it comes from putten, to draw water from a well. In the seventeenth century, goldfinches were popular pets because they could be taught a trick. The bird drank from a tiny bucket, about the size of a thimble, hung on a chain below its perch. To drink, it had to haul the chain up, link by link, with its bill and feet, then hold it there. People kept them for this. The name means “little water-drawer.”

This is where it came together for me. The trick only works on a bird that’s good at precise pulling. It needs a bird that can grip something small with the tip of its bill, draw it toward itself, and pin it down with a foot while it reaches for the next bit. That is exactly the skill a thistle head demands. It wasn’t only goldfinches: old pet-keeping books say siskins and bullfinches could learn the trick too, and they’re small seed-pickers as well. But the goldfinch is the one the trick was named after. It got that bill from generations of working out seed from between spines, and the same bill is what made it worth catching, chaining, and showing off to guests. The thistle made the goldfinch able to do something, and people turned that ability into a party trick.

The painting doesn’t show the bucket. It shows the chain, and I think that’s the better choice. Fabritius painted the whole arrangement flat and plain: box, rings, wall, a bird that has turned its head to look out at you. He doesn’t make a point of the chain. It’s just part of the furniture, the way it would have been in any house that kept one. What’s actually on the panel is a wild seed-eater at rest, a little way off the ground, with a light chain on one leg that you can easily miss.

Fabritius died that October. A gunpowder store exploded in Delft on the 12th, flattened a large part of the town, and brought his studio down on top of him. Only about a dozen of his paintings are known today. The version you’ll most often read is that The Goldfinch was pulled intact from the rubble. That might be true, but I couldn’t find it documented. The painting reappears in the record in Brussels in 1859, about two hundred years later, and before that nobody seems able to say where it was. I’d rather say that plainly than tell the neater story.

I keep coming back to the chain, though, because the bird on the panel isn’t doing anything. It isn’t working the bucket or performing. It’s just sitting on its ring. Fabritius could have painted the trick, the thing the bird was kept for, and instead he painted the bird. After all these wakes of drawing the plant, it’s odd to meet its bird this way. It’s the same creature that follows the thistle down across a field, with the same thistle-tuned bill, now pulling up its own drink one link at a time on the wall of a Delft room, because people found the skill charming.

— Briar