The Vanishing Velázquez

by Laura Cumming

  It was the carpenter who suggested breaking into the building. They were just clambering in through the window that he managed to jimmy open when a neighbor caught them in flagrante and sent for a policeman to arrest them on the spot. The bookseller’s good name was momentarily in doubt. But after a sensible discussion, helped along by tea, during which Snare must have been remarkably silver-tongued, the policeman offered his sympathies and even helped them acquire a front-door key. They got into the building, only to discover every door inside firmly locked.

  “I began to wish I had never seen the Picture in the first place. I felt almost ashamed to return again to Reading.” But home went Snare, empty-handed once more. It was the first of his troubles with the law.

  The painting finally reached Minster Street a week later. What Snare now owned was an object in a box; a painting without a past, about which he knew nothing whatsoever. He had not seen it in a museum supported by some reassuring caption or catalogue. It had no signature, title or date. The painter was unknown and the whole modern apparatus of art history, critical writing, markets, prices, painstakingly researched provenance and all did not exist. The painting had no context, had just spoken to him out of the darkness. Snare had nothing to rely upon but his eyes and his instinct.

  Radley Hall had at least lent a fine elevating grandeur to the portrait. At home, in the back shop, Snare could hardly bear to look at the thing in case it had reverted to the grimy rectangle of his first sighting. But he steeled himself, propped the picture on two chairs against the wall, and was instantly more despondent than ever. “The paint was dry and husky . . . and there was a chalky aspect which very far from pleased me.” The masterpiece seemed to dwindle in its Minster Street surroundings and Snare could not tell whether the fault lay with the picture or its filthy condition. He fetched a sponge, dampened with a little turpentine, and proceeded to give the surface a halfhearted dab.

  “I never can forget the impression which the sudden change induced. The drapery, as if by magic, came to light, the fair proportions of the figure and the brilliant tones in which it was depicted, all in an instant glowed before me. I saw the masterly treatment of a mighty artist and without time for reflection, I started from my chair and ran to fetch my wife and show her the treasure I possessed.” He could neither eat nor sleep and sat staring at the picture until three in the morning, rising early to sit before it once again. “I was alive with exultation, and thought of nothing save only that I had found the long-lost Portrait.”

  Later that morning, Mr. Keavin called in to take a proper look at “their” Van Dyck, enthusiastically repeating his opinion as if it were gospel. But still Snare kept his thoughts to himself. He was already a true believer—“I could have vouched for the authenticity of the Portrait even as if I had seen it painted”—but he needed some kind of proof before he could reveal his conviction to anyone except Isabella. The difficulty was where to begin. Snare had no idea where to look for clues to the painting, its history or even that of the artist himself.

  3

  The Painter

  VELÁZQUEZ IS SOMETIMES said to be the most distant of artists, remote and inscrutable as a star in outer darkness. His life is unknowable, his mind unfathomable, his genius for creating illusions of living people almost beyond comprehension, as if he were not quite a real human being himself. Even in death he manages to escape. Some years ago, to mark the fourth centenary of Velázquez’s birth, the Spanish government excavated not one but two churches in the hope of finding his corpse, digging cavernous holes and stopping traffic for months in the center of Madrid. Still nobody knows where—if anywhere—his body now lies.

  It is true that Velázquez remains strangely beyond the reach of documented fact. We know he was baptized in Seville on June 6, 1599, the eldest child of a church notary, Juan Rodríguez de Silva, and his wife, Jerónima Velázquez, though the date of his birth is not known. The family lived in a two-story building in a maze of cramped streets. The house is still standing, but closed to the outside world; to go there now is to learn nothing of his boyhood four centuries ago except that the sky was visible in narrow blue bands above the alleys, that the fish market was close, that the cathedral bells were clankingly audible.

  We could say he led a sheltered life. At eleven, Velázquez moved a few streets across town to become the star pupil in the studio of the artist and scholar Francisco de Pacheco—“a gilded cage of art,” an early biographer called it—qualifying as a master six years later. At eighteen, he married Pacheco’s daughter, which might seem convenient or prudent, but who knows what was in his heart. Nothing much is learned about his bride except that her name was Juana and she may (or may not) have been the model for a painting of the Virgin Mary. One early trip to Madrid in search of patrons was unsuccessful, but the next produced an immediate commission from the teenage Spanish king, Philip IV. Velázquez was hired as royal painter to the court, over the heads of more senior artists, in 1624. He now lived in a larger gilded cage. Many people thought his art was some kind of magic. Apart from two hard-won trips to Rome, from one of which he attempted not to return, he never left Spain and scarcely traveled outside the court, where he was eventually promoted to the rank of king’s high chamberlain. This is what the early documents tell us, at any rate, but they reduce a life at least as complex and profound as any other to a childish fable.

  But pass through the looking glass into the world of his art and Velázquez becomes visible straight away, literally so in Las Meninas. Here the painter presides like a father figure over the bright party he has conjured, a man of intense tact and restraint who is clearly holding back, stepping into the shadows, not the spotlight. Nonetheless he is making an appearance, and in the full regalia of office, too—tucked into his belt is the emblematic master key that opens every door of the Alcázar (freedom of the palace, highest honor); emblazoned on his doublet is the red cross of the Knights of Santiago, the noble order to which he was eventually elected. Around him are his colleagues and friends, as well as his royal employer in the person of the little princess. Here is Velázquez’s life—and what the painting declares (among all its infinite nuances) is that this life, like the scene itself, was entirely made by his art.

  It is beyond belief that people should say, as they frequently do, that the painter gives nothing away in this self-portrait. Look at the little dots of pigment on his palette: they echo the chain of faces in the room, as well as the colors needed to make the painting, repeating the central compositional truth that the artist is responsible for everything you see. Look at the way Velázquez paints his tapering fingers as if they were brushes. Look at the actual brush; that it is no more than a darting streak of white, the one mark that is illegible at any distance and yet so sharply itself, feels like the subtlest of quips. The whole painting has been set in motion by its delicate tip—which effectively vanishes. No other artist before or since has made the paradox of painting so manifest, the strange idea that three dimensions can be persuasively portrayed on a flat sheet of cloth with paint colors and a brush; or, in his case, that fixed pictures can represent the mobile, ever-changing world around us to such a pitch and yet themselves dissolve into flux.

  Given the existence of Las Meninas, it does not seem so bad that we have scarcely a single document that gives any sense of Velázquez’s inner life.

  • • •

  About his professional career a great deal is known. One memoir was published during the artist’s own lifetime, another written when people who knew him were still alive to give their recollections. Both are brief, just single chapters in longer books, and the second makes shameless use of the first. But they are the starting point of all our knowledge to this day, the vital biographical sources for anyone in search of Velázquez. John Snare, in 1845, had to search hard for them both.

  The first memoir was a seventeenth-century fragment written in Spanish. But Snare was undaunted; he soon had the name of a reputable scholar (Mr. Vizer: everyone who ever he
lps Snare is touchingly named in the pamphlets) who would translate it into English. The second was contained in an influential work much mentioned by Richard Ford and already published in English by 1739: Antonio Palomino’s Lives and Works of the Most Eminent Spanish Painters. Palomino was an artist himself, had even been royal painter to the Spanish court some decades after Velázquez. He gives us almost the only surviving anecdotes about the painter and writes beautifully about the mysteries of his work. But the pure gold in his brief biography—to Snare, as much as to us—is the description of actual paintings. Without Palomino, we would know even less about certain lost works; and for Snare, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Spanish writer could give a vital impression—only an impression, but better than nothing—of how and what Velázquez painted, of paintings that Snare would never see. What he didn’t know was just how close some of them were to him in Reading.

  Richard Ford, in his Handbook for Travellers to Spain, urged his readers to make the journey from England to Madrid, no matter how grueling—a week by ship to Cadiz, several more by carriage on roads rocky enough, he complains, to dislocate a hip—for the chance to see the art of Velázquez in the Prado. “Here alone is he to be studied in all his protean power. Look therefore at every one of his pictures, for we ne’er shall see their like again.” But in fact several paintings had already made the journey in reverse, reaching England by even more circuitous routes from Spain. One of them came through seventeenth-century Belgium and eighteenth-century Paris to a London auction in 1813, where it was bought by a haberdasher named Samuel Peach in a temporary case of mistaken identity; the picture was unsigned and was listed as the work of a different Spaniard altogether, the ever-popular master of angels and urchins, Bartolomé Murillo. But there was a date on the canvas—1618—and what it reveals about this dazzling performance is an exceptional truth about Velázquez: that his genius was there from the very beginning.

  The scene is a darkened tavern filled with objects, each gleaming in its own spotlight. A red onion, an egg, a white bowl balancing a silver knife, a brass vessel full of reflected glory: all appear as if laid out on an altar, singular, mysterious and sacramental. Velázquez pays the greatest respect to each humble item, and each is painted with mesmerizing beauty. Even the strung melon cradled by the young boy on the left shines like some strange new gift to the world.

  This boy and the old woman cooking eggs are not quite types, and not just models, but portraits of people in Seville, where Velázquez painted this masterpiece when he was not much more than eighteen. They will reappear in other pictures, like the company of actors in the films of Ingmar Bergman. There is no interaction or dialogue in this early scene, however, and the stage directions are obviously minimal. Each person is simply to pose, lost in thought, for their role is very like that of the teenage prodigy who is painting them: to show off these objects—the eggs, the melon, the reflective glass flask—to hold them to the light and our contemplation.

  The whole tableau was visibly made to bewitch, and so it does. But at the quick of it is a feat of staggering veracity: the star-spangled pan of eggs coalescing from translucent fluid to opaque white flux, a moment in which liquid becomes solid, acquires visible form—just like the magical illusion of painting itself. It might be Velázquez’s own emblem.

  These early kitchen scenes show earthenware pots and jars, pitchers of water and wine, the heavy hands and faces of Spanish workers, with the same unsurpassed realism and respect that Velázquez will later extend to inbred Hapsburg kings. But they give us something of his way of thinking, too. For even just to paint such subjects, no matter how superbly, was to defy everything his teacher represented. Francisco de Pacheco’s career was in religious art; he was the censor of images for the Inquisition in Seville, and among his many friends were theologians who gathered to discuss religion and philosophy at salons in his house. A notorious dispute about the number of nails used to crucify Christ occurred at one such meeting; Pacheco thought four, not three, a conviction pedantically restated in his frigid altarpieces. Yet his pupil went right against the grain; Velázquez painted hardly any religious paintings in any case, but those that survive are on our side of life—deeply and radically human. The old woman from the tavern, for instance, reappears later that same year in the foreground of Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, no longer frying eggs but bossing a young maidservant in the kitchen. Their world of mortal, palpable reality is much larger than the little Bible story behind them, viewed as if through a frame in this split-screen picture.

  In the background Christ is in mid-parable in what might be a painting, a window or some peculiar hatch in the wall behind the old woman and the girl with the swollen eyelids, who has surely been crying only moments before we see her—and she sees us. For whatever else is going on in this haunting picture, with its silvery still life of garlic cloves, eggs, fish and chilies—another theater of glinting objects—what strikes first and foremost is this potent relationship between the girl in the painting and the viewer outside. We look at her and she looks back, apparently conscious of our looking. The whole picture stages that connection. There is a premonition of Las Meninas here—of seeing and being seen, of the picture as an open-ended performance—when Velázquez was not yet twenty.

  This painting was only a train journey away from Berkshire in Snare’s day, but it was in social respects entirely out of reach. It belonged to Colonel Packe, who had led several campaigns during the Peninsular War and brought the painting home from Spain as a kind of souvenir to Twyford Hall in Norfolk. A carpenter’s bill charges Packe twelve shillings in 1833 for restoring the picture by this strangely named foreigner, “Valest.” The spelling is secondhand guesswork; naturally there was no signature on the canvas.

  Palomino tells us that although the Seville paintings were revered throughout the city for their solid and breathtaking veracity, they were also criticized for being too low-life, with the implication that the rebellious young prodigy ought not to waste his talents on kitchens or crockery. Velázquez, in one of very few recorded remarks, apparently retorted: “I would rather be first painter of coarse things than second in higher art.” But by the time he reached Madrid, where his subject was the court and his art would become astonishingly evanescent, he was first in both and did not have to choose.

  Palomino takes the remark from Velázquez’s first biographer, none other than Pacheco himself, whose mediocre gifts as a painter were so eclipsed by his pupil. Infuriatingly brief, given the little we know of Velázquez as a living man, this chapter in Pacheco’s Lives of the Painters, published in 1649, is also effusively proud; not just because the pupil was so elevated at the royal court, but because he was also the author’s own son-in-law.

  Pacheco opens with unintended bathos by placing Velázquez up there with Titian and one Romulo Cincinato, of whom not a single painting is now highly regarded. He praises his pupil’s virtue, chastity and so forth, and then offers an oleaginous thank-you to Philip for having Velázquez to stay all these years at the palace. Much boasting, name-dropping and talk of money ensues, until the reader could cry out for some mention of the art or the character of the man who made it. But sift the narrative and occasional gleanings emerge, the first of which is the story of how the young painter of low taverns came, with great rapidity, to become the high star of the palace.

  In 1623 Velázquez travels to Madrid in hope of advancement, taking with him a painting known as The Waterseller of Seville (Plate B). There he meets a high-placed churchman from Pacheco’s circle, Juan de Fonseca, who is now chaplain to Philip IV. Amazed by the painting, Fonseca buys it immediately; Velázquez then paints Fonseca, a feat evidently achieved in the space of one day, for that very evening a chamberlain rushes the portrait over to the Alcázar. “Within the hour everyone in the palace saw it, the Infantes and the King himself, which is the greatest distinction it could receive. It was decided that the artist should paint his majesty.”

  This is the classic V
elázquez anecdote: a portrait made for a purpose, with extraordinary rapidity, which is then shown around town while the paint is still wet, to the amazement of all who see it. This will happen more than once. Pacheco, ever pedantic, concedes that His Majesty was too busy to be portrayed straight away—he had obligations to a visiting guest, the young Prince Charles of England—but that an opportunity arose a few days later and the sitting took place on August 30, 1623.

  Philip IV was eighteen when he first posed for Velázquez. Puffy, adenoidal, so pale the blue veins are visible beneath the clammy white temples, with no sign yet of the famous upturned mustache that will attract attention away from the protuberant lips and long Hapsburg jaw: the early portraits are more truthful than flattering, which may be why the very first, painted that August day, has vanished beneath the surface of another version, one of three more painted that autumn. Still everyone was stunned; the gentlemen of the palace agreed that the king had never truly been portrayed until now, and the king decreed that nobody else should paint his person henceforth (a rule broken only by the infinitely more famous Rubens, visiting court a few years later).

  The first portrait sets off a chain reaction. Velázquez is given a royal salary and payment for each separate work on top. A month later he paints an equestrian portrait of Philip so fine that poems are written in awe. A salary rise follows, and a pension granted by the Pope to the tune of 300 ducats a year. And then, the clincher, Velázquez wins a painting contest set by the king, beating all the established court painters who had worked for Philip’s father before him, and whose rancor begins to leak into palace conversations. The winning prize is the job of usher of the bedchamber; it is the first rung in Velázquez’s ascent of the ladder.

  Pacheco’s biography is painfully limited in all the aspects that matter, but it does give a sense of the sudden surging miracle of Velázquez’s early career; and the facts are borne out by evidence. Two anthologies of documents have been published in the last forty years, the latest containing more than four hundred details mined from financial and legal statements, state papers and court archives by some of the greatest of Spanish scholars, yet they scarcely give us the man. Velázquez slips away.