The Vanishing Velázquez

by Laura Cumming

  In all this flux and confusion, people did not always know what they were looking at, still less what they were buying or selling. In England, Earl Spencer of Althorp had a painting of a bagpipe player that he thought was by Velázquez. In Scotland, the Earl of Elgin had a white poodle sniffing a bone. In rural Dorset, an English politician believed he had nothing less than the original version of Las Meninas, rather smaller and admittedly lacking some of the crucial details, but nonetheless the pride of his collection, if not England itself. Even today, some scholars believe he was right.

  For two centuries and more it has been confidently predicted that the small sum of Velázquez’s art would never increase, that no more paintings by him would now be found, that any lost paintings were permanently lost. But this has never been true. His pictures really have turned up again, tumbled in the tide of history, one by one, discovered in the most unlikely places: in Latin America; in an English seaside town; hiding in plain view on the walls of New York’s Metropolitan Museum in the twenty-first century.

  For Velázquez’s portraits, so miraculously empathetic and precise, so unmistakable and inimitable, as it seems, keep on being mistaken and overlooked. Perhaps something in his exceptionally enigmatic way of painting has veiled these works; something in their mystery and modesty—from the self-effacing brushwork to the absence of a signature—has obscured them. They depend upon the kindness of strangers to an unusual degree; they need people to find and to save them.

  Las Meninas presents the most famous piece of canvas in art: the blank back of the enormous picture on which the artist is working; it is the obverse of a painting, literally, but such a beautiful depiction of that vast stretch of cloth tacked to the stretcher. What Velázquez shows is the curious double nature of paintings: that they are objects as well as images; objects that are propped up and lugged about and screwed to high walls, that suffer calamity and misadventure, shipwreck and fire, that may be arbitrarily sacrificed to disaster or rescued by providence, bought and sold, crated up and transported, lost and found and sometimes even lost again.

  We say that works of art can change our lives, an optimistic piety that generally refers to the moral or spiritual uplift of a painting, and the way it may improve its audience. But art has other powers to alter our existence. The moment he bought the portrait of Prince Charles, Snare’s life changed direction. It was a lost work, disregarded, on its way to the oblivion from which he saved it in 1845. It was an object that he would be forced to defend from danger and theft, that took him from small-town provincial life to the most fashionable streets of London and New York, and from obscurity to newspaper fame; a painting he would take with him wherever he went, that came to mean more to him than anything in the world, more than his family, his home and himself, that would lead to exile, a lonely death in a cold-water tenement and an unmarked grave in New York: the painting that would ruin his life.

  Whatever one may come to think of John Snare in this book—and I came to question his motives, at times—his sincerity is never in doubt. He loved the art of Velázquez, at least the precious little he was ever able to see of it during his lifetime. He and I have stood in the same few places in England, amazed in front of the same few paintings in different centuries. If only he had lived in another era, he, too, might have been able to see Las Meninas.

  This is a book of praise for Velázquez, greatest of painters, a man whose life is almost as elusive as his art; and it is the portrait of an obscure Victorian who loved that art, in so far as I can bring Snare back out of the darkness. For he is to me like one of the figures in Las Meninas—the servant on the far edge by the window, the only person in that masterpiece about whom nothing is known, whose story is never told and who is all but a painted blur, vanishing into the shadows.

  2

  The Painting

  IT BEGAN WITH two inches of dense black print in the long columns of the Reading Mercury in October 1845. The fateful notice announced a forthcoming auction at Radley Hall near Oxford, home to Benjamin Kent’s Academy for Boys. The boarding school was closing down, the pupils were already gone and everything was up for sale. The Mercury mentioned bolsters and iron bedsteads, dictionaries and Latin grammars, but there was something else, too. Mr. Kent was selling his art.

  The notice was buried among advertisements for top hats and patent tonics for overburdened mothers, but it did not escape John Snare. The bookseller felt a sudden excitement on seeing it. He had once been to Radley Hall with a friend who knew the headmaster, and had seen the paintings now mentioned in the Mercury: Dutch landscapes, portraits of medieval bishops, a very ancient picture of an abbess and a pope. But the one that had most intrigued him, too poorly lit and high on the wall to be properly visible, was also the one identified in the advertisement as something special: “A Half-Length of Charles the First (supposed Van-dyke).”

  Auctions were a blessing for a provincial tradesman like Snare. There were no art galleries in Reading and this was still the dawn of the museum age, when most people saw paintings, if they saw any at all, in traveling shows or at church on Sunday. The private collections of country houses were generally closed to anyone without superior social connections, whereas auctions, no matter how valuable the paintings, were open to all. Even the hastiest of bankruptcy sales might have several public previews when visitors could linger over the art in the guise of potential customers, a tradition that reached right back through the ages. This was how Rembrandt saw, and sketched, Raphael’s famed portrait of Baldassare Castiglione when it surfaced at an auction in Amsterdam in 1639, giving it a somewhat bulbous Dutch nose, more like his own; this was the only way most people would see Rembrandt’s own paintings for centuries.

  The Reading Mercury was on sale in Snare’s Minster Street shop, a handsome double-fronted emporium with large bow windows, elaborate cornices and enough shelves to take the burden of an immense and ever-expanding miscellany of publications, from The Lancet and Punch to the latest novels of Dickens and Thackeray, guides to beekeeping, taxidermy and the far-flung islands of the South Pacific. Advertisements in the Mercury itself reveal the proud diversity of his stock. At Snare’s, customers could buy anything from Paradise Lost to the Bible and Shakespeare, along with quaint picture books, oil paints and India rubbers, blotting paper and colored ink. Snare even sold prints of famous paintings; that same autumn of 1845 he was offering Jacques-Louis David’s devastating portrait of Marat stabbed to death in his bath. For art was his passion; Snare was “an amateur of pictures,” as they were known: a lover of paintings.

  How old he was then is unclear, for his early life has slipped from the records. He was probably born in 1808, but the birth certificate has gone and in later life Snare was inconsistent about his age. His father was an ironmonger at 21 Minster Street, selling hammers, screws and iron pails; his uncle was the founder of the shop at number 16, which originally specialized in selling hymn books and pious poetry for Sunday consumption. If Snare had any education beyond the age of ten, in those days the school-leaving age in Reading, there is no documentary proof of it, but the documents are in any case less illuminating than the town’s local newspapers—three of them, for a population of scarcely 20,000 people—in which one catches sight of the bookseller in his shop and about town, moving through the momentous events of his life as if through a magnifying glass.

  “Snare and Nephew” is the new sign above the door when he is apprenticed to his uncle, who has now diversified into printing. The young John learns how to set the finicky rows of metal type in their wooden frames, ink the plates and gold-stamp the leather bindings of books. One day he will become known for the aesthetic beauty of his printing, and for experimenting with early photogravure engravings; but in the meantime the two Snares turn out visiting cards, election posters and theater handbills in the back room behind the shop as the book business develops in the front. At night, when the presses are silent, Snare reads his way steadily through the stock to develop a writing style of his ow
n, first evident in the lyrical passages he contributes to an illustrated Berkshire guide printed on the Minster Street presses. In 1838 he inherits the shop and in the same year, by now a rather mature bachelor for the times, he marries Isabella Williams, whose family has some involvement in the local bank. A man of buoyant aspirations, he starts a small lending library and begins to compile a local postal directory for Reading, setting his neighbors’ names in elegant fonts. His own name appears in the 1847 edition, living with Isabella and their three small children above the shop at number 16, which is where he read the advertisement in the Mercury with its promise of the supposed Van Dyck. There were to be three viewings before the sale. He would be just in time for the last.

  Victorian auctions were arranged like exhibitions, with advance tickets and printed catalogues, though these were generally crude and unhelpful. What they declared, on the whole, was that a painting of an unknown gentleman was for sale, or a fish, or two cows drinking by a river. Possibly Dutch. So it was at Radley Hall, a Georgian mansion in grounds landscaped by Capability Brown where one could expect to see kings as well as cows, according to the terse catalogue issued by the auctioneers, Belcher and Harris. “The whole assemblage consists of 180 lots, the particulars whereof it would be difficult to describe,” they shrug, making no attempt to talk up the art beyond the occasional stab at a painter or country of origin; not that there was any great risk in these guesses, which were often absurdly awry, for the unspoken rule of the auction was, and remains, caveat emptor: buyer beware.

  Snare was no buyer, at least not at this stage; he was going to see a historic image of a famous king while the opportunity was briefly open to all. Yet he seems to have had a sixth sense about the painting, for he took along a fellow amateur, a Mr. Keavin, for a second opinion of the portrait of Charles and the teasing mention of Van Dyck, greatest of all his court painters; who knew, perhaps the picture would be worth a king’s ransom.

  The journey on one of the new steam trains out of Reading, stopping at every little station, was so laborious that the light was already failing when they reached Radley Hall. But this time Snare was prepared. He waited until the other visitors had gone and then dragged a ladder from the library into the salon where the large painting hung high on the wall, so darkened by time that they could hardly make out the features. Clambering up until he was eye to eye with Charles, Snare wet a finger and rubbed the surface like a window cleaner. “I never can forget the impression,” he wrote, “as the tones came alive like magic.” Materializing before him was the face of a young man, bearded, dark-eyed, solitary, a faint dew on his brow, looming pale and close in the gloom, a monarch destined to die on the scaffold.

  The more he stared at the painting, amazed, the more John Snare began to feel that the catalogue, such as it was, must somehow be wrong. The portrait certainly showed Charles, wearing armor, but he was too young to be king; so this must be Charles as a prince. But if it was a portrait of Prince Charles, then it couldn’t possibly be by Van Dyck, for the Flemish painter arrived in England only in 1632, eight years after Charles had become king, and by which time he looked considerably older. It did not seem that “Charles the First (supposed Van-dyke)” could be entirely right.

  Snare the autodidact, haunter of auctions, close student of engraved reproductions, and of all the prints of kings that he had managed to collect or discover in the many books in his shop, recognized the young Charles immediately. But he could not recall a single image that looked anything like this portrait, so fluid and enigmatic, not even in the prolific works of Van Dyck. This was surely by an artist of equal stature, if not higher still—he was thinking of the Spaniard Velázquez.

  On the way home, Mr. Keavin urged his friend to return and bid, convinced that they really had seen a genuine Van Dyck. Snare had already resolved to do so, but managed to keep quiet.

  • • •

  “The lovers of Art are well acquainted with the fact that no productions are more rare in England than the works of Velázquez.” The opening line of Snare’s “Brief Description of the Portrait of Prince Charles” acknowledges the glaring impossibility straight away. No matter how thrilling it might be to come upon a Van Dyck, the Flemish painter’s portraits of Charles with languid eyes and flowing hair were practically ubiquitous compared to the art of Velázquez. Not only was Velázquez one of the least productive painters of all time but his works were still very rarely seen outside Madrid, still less in some defunct boarding school in rural Oxfordshire. Snare knew that the chances were infinitesimal, yet he could not help taking a whisper of hope from one of the books on the shelves of the Minster Street shop, Richard Ford’s recently published A Handbook for Travellers in Spain.

  Based on a four-year tour of a country that still seemed as remote as the South Pacific to most readers back home, Ford’s vigorous guide is an early masterpiece of travel writing. It runs all the way from awe at the sublime sierras to disgust at the worst hotels, is deeply versed in history and culture and at the same time bristling with useful tips on mosquito nets, drinkable water and Spanish cheese, where to send a telegram and how to discuss politics with a quick-tempered Madrileño.

  Ford looks at paintings wherever he goes and writes superbly about them. He is amazed, above all, by the truth and beauty of the art of Velázquez in the Prado. “No man,” he observes with piercing acuity, “could draw the minds of men, or paint the air we breathe better than he.” His close praise of each painting in the museum, in a land so far beyond the comfortable circuit of the Grand Tour, was at least partly responsible for the rising passion for Velázquez in Britain; and it is in this book that Ford speaks in passing of a portrait of Prince Charles painted by Velázquez in 1623. The author laments the fact that he cannot see the painting, mentioned in an early Spanish biography; as far as he knows, it has not survived.

  If the much-traveled Ford thought it was lost, then how could Snare possibly have found it? The mention only made the bookseller more hopeful. Though he was leery of confessing his dream to Mr. Keavin—“I was half ashamed of my own thoughts, and afraid lest I should be mocked”—Snare could not help reasoning that if it once existed, then the portrait might still exist somewhere in the world even now, and why not, perhaps, in Radley Hall?

  The day of the auction arrived, along with dealers up from London and rich country squires with empty walls to fill. Perhaps the painting would be snatched by a higher bidder, whisked away at the eleventh hour by someone who knew its true worth far better than Snare, someone with deeper pockets, more experience, a connection with the London market. Or then again perhaps the opposite would happen, and the picture would be comprehensively scorned as scarcely a Van Dyck, let alone an actual Velázquez. Which would be worse for the hopeful amateur: to be trumped, or to bid for what might be nothing at all, thus making a fool of oneself before the cognoscenti? Two London dealers, Mr. Blaker of Covent Garden and Mr. Street of Soho, were already circling on Snare’s arrival at Radley Hall. His courage instantly faltered. Indeed he was so fearful of drawing attention to the Velázquez by staring too fixedly at it that he stood directly below, where he could not see it.

  As the auction began, Snare seems to have become so afraid of showing his hand, or perhaps of making some hapless gesture mistaken for a bid, that he actually asked Street to represent him. Taking pity on this provincial bookseller, the metropolitan dealer condescended. Lot 72 was announced towards midday. The bidding started at five pounds; the hammer soon came down at eight.

  In that winning moment two opposing waves of emotion overcame poor Snare—swiftly departing joy, followed by listless deflation. Perhaps he had bought nothing, a pig in a poke; after all, he could scarcely see what he had in that blackened rectangle. The price was low, not much more than the cost of a horse in Victorian England, a fact that worried Snare (who had nerved himself to bid all the way up to a ruinous £200 if necessary) and a figure that would arouse some suspicion in years to come. But the market price of a painting is no pr
oof of its authenticity or value, and it never has been. The history of the art trade is full of ridiculous misattributions and preposterously low bids, up to and beyond Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi, which changed hands for a mere £45 in 1958. Two years after Radley Hall, Richard Ford himself bought one of Velázquez’s royal portraits for only £13. Ten years later, as the mania for Velázquez was growing, another of his paintings went for a nugatory £15 at the height of the London season in a room dense with international dealers, and at the turn of the twentieth century Velázquez’s Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, which still haunts visitors to the National Gallery in London with its strange double world, as if seen through a window, sold for not even £23. In fact, Snare would soon be offered one hundred times the price he paid that day at an obscure country-house sale, but for the moment he had to leave empty-handed, for he had given no thought to how he might ferry the picture home.

  The following day he returned to the village of Radley and found a carpenter to knock up a big wooden box in double-quick time, which the two men lugged up to the Hall. But to Snare’s dismay, they arrived too late. All the other bidders had long since retrieved their purchases, Radley Hall was locked and dusk was once more on its way.