The Vanishing Velázquez

by Laura Cumming

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  Contents

  1 A Discovery

  2 The Painting

  3 The Painter

  4 Minster Street

  5 Man in Black

  6 The Talk of London

  7 A Man in Full

  8 The Attack

  9 The Theater of Life

  10 Seizure and Theft

  11 The Trial

  12 The Escape

  13 Velázquez on Broadway

  14 The Escape Artist

  15 The Vanishing

  16 Seeing Is Believing

  17 The Ghost of a Picture

  18 An Infinite Number of Charleses

  19 Lost and Found

  20 Saved

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  About Laura Cumming

  List of Illustrations

  Notes on Sources

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  For Hilla, Thea, Elizabeth and Dennis with all my heart And in memory of the painter James Cumming

  1

  A Discovery

  MY FATHER DIED quite suddenly when I was in my late twenties. He was a painter. The fatal illness attacked his brain, then his eyes. In my raging grief, I could not bear to look at any paintings but his, as a way of holding the memory of him as close and tight as possible, I suppose, and in blind protest against the blighting of his life and art.

  Several months passed. I went to Madrid in a bitter midwinter, a city chosen because neither he nor I had ever been there and I couldn’t speak the language. There would be no old associations and no new conversations; time could stand still while I thought about nothing and no one but him. Every day I would leave my hotel room and walk round and round the streets, spiraling out to the freezing suburbs and the snowcapped hills beyond. I did not know what else to do.

  But Madrid is not large; I would pass the Prado Museum time and again, sometimes twice in one day, steeling myself not to go in. Eventually the effort to avoid the place became a distraction in itself and it was there, in that crowded city within a city, that I had the luckiest of strikes. On a hunt for El Greco, one of my father’s favorite painters, I was passing the opening to a large gallery when a strange frisson of light caught the edge of my eye. As I turned to look, all the people standing at the other end of the gallery suddenly moved aside as one, clearing an open view to the source of that light: Velázquez’s monumental Las Meninas. I had no thought of it, no idea it would be there or how vast it would be—an image the size of life, and fully as profound. The living people revealed the painted people behind them like actors in the same performance, and flashing up before me was the mirror-bright vision of a little princess, her young maidservants and the artist himself, all gathered in a pool of sunlight at the bottom of a great volume of shadow, an impending darkness that instantly sets the tenor of the scene. The moment you set eyes on them, you know that these beautiful children will die, that they are already dead and gone, and yet they live in the here and now of this moment, brief and bright as fireflies beneath the sepulchral gloom. And what keeps them here, what keeps them alive, or so the artist implies, is not just the painting but you.

  You are here, you have appeared: that is the split-second revelation in their eyes, all these people looking back at you from their side of the room. The princess in her shimmering dress, the maids in their ribbons and bows, the tiny page and the tall, dark painter, the nun whose murmur is just fading away and the chamberlain silhouetted in the glowing doorway at the back: everyone registers your presence. They were here like guests at a surprise party waiting for your arrival and now you have entered the room—their room, not the real one around you—or so it mysteriously seems. The whole scene twinkles with expectation. That is the first sensation on the threshold of that gallery in the Prado where Las Meninas hangs: that you have walked into their world and become suddenly as present to them as they are to you.

  The image holds you there, stopped in surprise, motionless as the moment it represents in which all these people pause too, except the little page nudging the stoic dog. Everything is still except for the circumambient air and the light fluttering across the white-blond hair of the princess, who stares at you with the candid curiosity of a child at the center of a painting that is itself so completely attentive. The dwarf gives you her frank consideration, hand on heart, the maids kneel or curtsy, the servants observe you, all the way to the man in black hovering on the threshold of this room, waiting to usher you into the next. And from behind the back of the great canvas on which he is working, the size of this one, steps the painter himself, taciturn, watchful, the magician momentarily revealed.

  But take a few steps towards this painting in all its astounding veracity and the vision swithers. The princess’s lustrous hair begins to look like a mirage, or a heatwave scintillating above a summer road that vanishes at your approach. The face of the lady dwarf dissolves into illegible brushstrokes. The figures in the background become inchoate at point-blank range and you can no longer see where a hand stops and the tray it is holding begins. The nearer you get to the painting, the more these semblances of reality start to disappear, to the point where it is impossible to fathom how the image could have been made in the first place. Everything is on the verge of dissolution and yet so vividly present that the sunshine in the painting seems to float free and drift out into the gallery. It is the most spellbinding vision in art.

  Las Meninas—The Maidservants—was most likely painted in 1656, four years before Velázquez’s own sudden death (Plate A). It shows a chamber of the royal Alcázar palace in Madrid that is also long gone, destroyed in two days by a fire. This was the very room in which the picture was first shown: only imagine how perfectly the illusion must have merged with the reality when it hung there, the two sides of the chamber, real and depicted, presumably appearing seamlessly connected. To walk in and find these people waiting there must have been astonishing—like entering a dream, or a flickering projection of life quite unimaginable before the invention of cinema—for it still amazes today. Velázquez keeps this vanished circle before us like the moment’s reflection in a mirror, and his painting has the characteristics of a mirror, too: look into it and you are seen in return. Many paintings have the scene-shifting power to take us to another time and place but this one goes further, creating the illusion that the people you see are equally aware of your presence, that their scene is fulfilled by you. Velázquez invents a new kind of art: the painting as living theater, a performance that extends out into our world and gives a part to each and every one of us, embracing every single viewer. For anyone who stands before Las Meninas now, held fast by the eyes of these lost children and servants, is positioned exactly where the people of the past once stood. This is part of the picture’s content. It elects you to the company of all who have ever seen it, from the little princess and her maids, who must have rushed around to see themselves the moment Velázquez finished, to the king and queen who appear in miniature in that glimmering mirror at the back. We stand where they once stood, the mirror implies (and the servants’ eyes), looking into this scene, this moment held intact down the centuries. The picture turns the world upside down, so that citizens may take the place of kings, and kings may be tiny compared to children. We stand together in history and Las Meninas gathers us all into its boundless democracy.

  The painting I saw tha
t day seems to hold death back from the brink even as it acknowledges our shared human fate. It shows the past in all its mortal beauty, but it also looks forward into the flowing future. Because of Velázquez, these long-lost people will always be there at the heart of the Prado, always waiting for us to arrive; they will never go away, as long as we are there to hold them in sight. Las Meninas is like a chamber of the mind, a place where the dead will never die. The gratitude I feel to Velázquez for this greatest of paintings is untold; he gave me the consolation to return to my own life.

  • • •

  We see paintings in time and place (no picture makes this clearer, putting us on the spot and in the moment) and always in the context of our own lives. We cannot see them otherwise, no matter how objective we might hope to be. Novelists long ago recognized this truth; literature is full of characters falling in love with the people in paintings, obsessing over enigmatic figures or shapes, feeling intimidated—or intensely disappointed, in the case of Madame Bovary—by their first sighting of a tarry Old Master. Fictional people are allowed to have feelings about art entirely unconnected with the analysis of formal attributes, still less any knowledge of art history. But this is not how the rest of us are encouraged to view art by specialists and historians, for whom feelings may be dubious, unstable or irrelevant. If one should happen to experience an involuntary personal response, an eminent art historian once advised me, as if mentioning some embarrassing arousal, one should always keep it firmly to oneself.

  Over time, many scholars have written about the mysteries of Las Meninas: who or what Velázquez might be painting on that huge canvas—is it the king and queen, is it this very painting—who the painter is looking at, what the mirror reflects, what is happening in the picture, how it was constructed. Architects have made scale models of the room in an attempt to “solve” these puzzles through perspective, although the painting does not itself abide by those laws. Physicists have experimented with mirrors and light to comprehend the paradoxes. Art historians have attempted to deduce, stroke by stroke, how on earth the illusion was achieved. The philosopher Michel Foucault, in an essay in Les mots et les choses, with its famous conclusion that Las Meninas is nothing less (and perhaps nothing more, for him) than “the representation of Classical representation,” inaugurated whole schools of theoretical interpretation.

  But the compelling humanity of Velázquez’s vision is ignored. Some historians actually believe he was only talking to himself or his employer, Philip IV, the little king in the mirror, so that all the beautiful open-ended complexities that have enthralled viewers down the centuries are either our mistaken fantasy or a closed conversation between two Spanish men. Yet Las Meninas is living proof of the opposite, that when painters make images they do not do so in some kind of austere isolation or without hope of an audience beyond the studio. For this painting accepts as many interpretations as there are viewers, and part of its grace lies in allowing all these different responses to coexist, no matter how contradictory, by being such a precise vision of reality and yet so open a mystery. Velázquez is able to make you, and all before and after you, feel as alive to these people as they are to you; everyone sees, everyone is seen. The knowledge that this is all achieved by brushstrokes, that these are only painted figments, does not weaken the illusion so much as deepen the enchantment. The whole surface of Las Meninas feels alive to our presence.

  This is at least as central to the technical feat of the painting as it is to our personal response, and still it goes unmentioned. There seems to be some collective recoil from the idea that art might actually overwhelm, distress or enchant us, might inspire wonder, anger, compassion or tears, that it might raise us up as a Shakespeare tragedy raises its audience. Even quite fundamental emotions are not in the language of scholarship, let alone museums, which rarely speak of the heart in connection with art. Yet so many people have loved Las Meninas.

  I believe this response is too often overlooked, even though it is clear that painters do not make pictures without some hope of reaching more than our eyes. Since art history does not concern itself much with the power of images to move or affect us, I went looking for other people’s reactions to art down the years in the literature of our daily existence. And it was here, among the memoirs, diaries and letters that tell of our encounters with art, that I came upon the strange case of this lucky—or unlucky—provincial tradesman, as he describes himself, and his love for a long-lost Velázquez.

  Or rather, in the drowsy shadows of a library in winter, I came upon a curious Victorian pamphlet stitched into a leather-bound miscellany between a quaint history of the Hawaiian Islands and a collection of short stories ominously titled Fact and Fiction. If the owner of this particular volume, a London lawyer with an elaborate Ex Libris plate, hadn’t underlined the words “A Brief Description of the Portrait of Prince Charles, afterwards Charles the First, painted at Madrid in 1623 by Velasquez” in heavy ink on the contents page, I might not have noticed it. By such accidents are the traces of people, and pictures, preserved. The pamphlet was anonymous, but someone, presumably the lawyer, had hazarded a name: J. Snare? John Snare? The guess turned out to be right.

  John Snare was a bookseller from the market town of Reading in Berkshire. His shop was at 16 Minster Street, the same address as the printer of the pamphlet, which he had evidently written and published himself. Snare describes the portrait quite clearly: it shows the young prince with his large liquid eyes and pale complexion, painted without rigidity or outline in an airy three-quarter view. Although the language is occasionally florid—he speaks of manliness and silken locks—for a moment, in the fug of the library at dusk, I seemed to think I had some inkling of this painting, which is commonly mentioned by historians as the one good thing to come out of Charles’s visit to Madrid to court the Spanish princess in 1623. In my mind I saw the young Charles, who had entirely failed to charm the disdainful infanta, given a better face by Velázquez, his dignity restored to the point of grace.

  Overnight, however, I began to doubt the description so much that I returned the next day to see if I had misread the pamphlet and dreamed fiction into fact. But John Snare and his story turned out to be real.

  The pamphlet was in fact a miniature catalogue for a one-picture show held in London to high acclaim in the spring of 1847. But how did Snare come to be its curator, and how did he discover the lost painting in the first place? It wasn’t hard to find answers to these obvious questions to begin with; but then the case turned into a deeper mystery.

  Snare’s feeling for Velázquez touched me. He did not see the painting as a thing apart, remote from his own existence; it filled his mind as if it were a living being. He wrote another pamphlet, and then another, in the hope that others would feel for it, too. His obsession with discovering a past for the portrait eventually turned him into a detective and sent me on a search of my own.

  At first I was following the painting, like Snare, but soon I was following the fortunes of the bookseller, too. The trail took me to Edinburgh and a shocking court battle over the picture in 1851. The trial was a crossfire of rage, persecution and snobbery involving outraged aristocrats and awestruck engravers, experts from Soho and dealers from France, servants who had dusted the picture in an earl’s London mansion and frame makers who claimed to have seen it in quite other places. Every class of society was represented, from the Scottish nobility to the typesetters who worked alongside Snare in Reading and remembered his life-or-death passion for the portrait. I had never encountered a case where the voices of the past were so clearly heard speaking about art in an age before it became densely familiar through museums, exhibitions and reproductions. Scarcely a single witness had seen more than one Velázquez and many testified to the extraordinary surprise of this one, the face of the long-dead prince flashing up into a timeless present.

  For the art of Velázquez was rare, unfamiliar, obscure. He left so few paintings—not more than 120 over a forty-year career—it is right
ly said that he measured out his genius in thimblefuls. Almost all of his work was painted for the Spanish king and court and stayed exactly where it was made, long after his death, immured in the royal palaces. Even when the Prado first opened to the public in 1819, with the revelation of more than forty paintings by Velázquez, only the well-heeled traveler could have the slightest sense of his work that is so freely available to us today. Photography did not yet exist, prints were precious few and could scarcely convey his mysterious and diaphanous style, so that the only way a Velázquez could be kept in mind was through the fantastic vagaries of memory.

  No two Victorians would remember the portrait at the heart of this case in quite the same way.

  This was a time before paintings tended to have titles by which their subjects could be identified, and were often wildly misunderstood as a consequence; when it was hard to tell one anonymous sitter from another beneath the filth of old canvases; when paintings were easily mislabeled and signatures misread or slyly added by dealers, when genuine masterpieces could languish overlooked while pathetic imitations were exorbitantly prized.

  It was a time of grand houses full of dirt-blackened pictures, auctioneers hovering eagerly in the wings; of visitors paying to see a traveling stunner in the Egyptian Hall in London or the Pantheon in New York; when middlemen worked their way through the villas and courts of Europe sending back masterpieces sight unseen, while restorers primped up, or simply copied, old canvases, when a picture might be “identified” as a Velázquez just because it included a dark-eyed man with a Spanish goatee or an especially expressive mongrel.

  Some people knew Velázquez chiefly as a painter of dogs.

  By the early nineteenth century some of the paintings that had been locked away in Spain began to appear across Europe in the wake of the Peninsular War of 1808–14, in which British troops helped free Spain and Portugal from Napoleonic occupation. Works by Velázquez turned up on battlefields, in soldiers’ baggage and in the hands of go-betweens engaging in suspect acts of diplomacy, like a hoard of bright treasures suddenly emerging out of plowed soil. They did not pass straight into the hands of specialists as they would now, to be examined for every iota of evidence, but cropped up at auctions and postmortem picture sales, in people’s private houses and bequests, often quite randomly and without fanfare, occasionally disappearing straight back into the darkness. Every new discovery fanned the growing craze for Velázquez.