The Vanishing Velázquez

by Laura Cumming

  People now began to call in at Minster Street on the pretext of shopping, but always with an eye to the picture, hoping they might be the first to see it. Reports of this marvel were beginning to leak out around the market town—perhaps Snare, or one of his employees, could no longer hold back. The shop began to buzz with conversation and sudden new custom; and one afternoon an important carriage was observed outside the door. It belonged to Colonel Blagrave, who owned half of Reading and more, and who had come to view this new sensation for himself. Snare was out, but the foreman of the print works showed the visitor into the back room for a glimpse. The stunned colonel offered an astounding £1,000 on the spot, convinced that the portrait before him was not just another Van Dyck.

  If only Snare had accepted the colonel’s figure there and then—vastly more than anyone had ever paid for a Velázquez in England before—his life would not have turned towards the coming disaster. But the foreman, William Webb, politely refused the offer, explaining with prophetic regret that his employer was not inclined to sell the picture at any price. Webb would testify to the truth of that fact, and the events of that day, in Scotland some years later at the trial that would divide Snare’s life.

  Instead Snare had a room specially fitted out for his treasure, a miniature museum for a solo masterpiece. He now wanted everyone to see it. Notices of the picture on view at 16 Minster Street appeared in the Reading newspapers in the summer of 1846 and visitors began to pour into the shop. Fellow printers, fellow shopkeepers, schoolteachers, schoolchildren, the local MP, the local clergy, amateurs of every stripe: “likely every citizen of Reading and hereabouts,” as the foreman would later testify.

  Everyone admired the painting; and almost everyone thought it was a Van Dyck. “I would have given much to have heard one person express a doubt leaning towards the supposition I had so long cherished . . . but I was silently prosecuting my inquiries.”

  • • •

  Portraiture is the art of living beings, of the live encounter between two people; the painting depicts the fact that they were both there in the same place at the same time, that they breathed the same air. That the artist was there with the subject is part of the amazement inherent in certain portraits: that David drew Marie-Antoinette in a mob cap on the tumbril only moments before the guillotine; that Goya met and painted the Duke of Wellington in Spain; that Charles was ever in Madrid and that so unique a painter as Velázquez saw the young prince, before he, too, was executed, and depicted his living presence. This is one axis of portraiture, where the artist’s presence is part of the picture’s content, and the extent to which this is the case with Velázquez is apparent in all of his portraits. He sees the sitter, and the sitter looks back, responding to his penetrating intelligence. Stand before Las Meninas in the Prado, where Velázquez looks directly out at you from the shadows, and you may have exactly this experience today.

  Snare was fascinated by this passing encounter between Velázquez and the future king of England, and almost overcome by the thought that he might have the visual evocation of that very day right there, crystallized forever, in his Minster Street room. The colors of the Spanish flag might even be represented in a yellow-and-red curtain, draping over part of the globe, which had become apparent during the nerve-racking cleaning. But how could these two men have met, how could this portrait have come into existence? Snare needed more detail than Richard Ford’s Handbook could supply, and he began by taking a train to Oxford and applying for a ticket to search in the Bodleian Library.

  Charles, son of James VI of Scotland and and I England, was an impetuous and callow young prince of twenty-two in thrall to his father’s favorite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, in the year the portrait was painted. The two men dreamed up a secret plan to end centuries of hostility between Britain and Spain by traveling in disguise under false names—John and Thomas Smith—across Europe to Madrid, where the Protestant Charles would somehow win the hand of the king’s young sister, the Catholic Maria Anna. The two nations would thus be united by marriage. But the Spanish Match, as it is known, rapidly turned into one of the high farces of European history: Charles and Buckingham disguised as the Smiths in their wigs and false beards, nearly unmasked before they have even left England, violently sick at sea before they reach France, identified by German tourists outside Paris so that they have to reinforce their disguises with French periwigs, rustling goats for food and picking fights with the locals en route, arriving at the most rigidly formal court in Europe without invitation or warning. Their appearance, in March 1623, seems to have taken Philip so genuinely by surprise that everyone had to pretend the two Englishmen were more or less invisible for a week, until a sufficiently formal reception could be organized.

  Snare came across a volume of letters known as The Prince’s Cabala; Or, Mysteries of State, still regarded by historians today as one of the richest written portraits of James I’s court. Among the correspondence is an anonymous tip-off to James concerning Buckingham’s shocking behavior in Madrid, in which the duke is depicted sitting when he should be standing, raucous when he should be quiet, putting his feet up on the royal chairs, wandering about half-naked, calling the prince by insultingly ridiculous names, dishonoring the Alcázar with prostitutes, threatening the apostolic nuncios and ranting about the pecking order at banquets, as well as about the entire culture of the Spanish court, behind Philip’s back.

  Buckingham undermined the mission at every turn with his gall, although modern scholars have been able to show that each side seems to have been equally duplicitous in the masquerade of diplomacy. The Spanish interpreted Charles’s sudden arrival as a declaration that he intended to convert to Catholicism forthwith, while Charles believed that a royal marriage—on the cards as far back as 1604, with his older brother Henry as prospective groom—was a virtual certainty, whatever he did. There were hideous misunderstandings from the start: Spain put on banquets, plays and concerts, produced bishops and nuncios for persuasive discussions of Catholicism; England sent out high-church Anglicans to convince the Spanish that it, too, had its incense. But Maria Anna had no intention of marrying a Protestant and the longer the prince lingered, failing to convert, the harder it was for the Spanish to eject him without delivering a lethal insult to the English. The Count-Duke Olivares, prime minister, puppet-master and favorite of Philip IV, engaged in some complex skulduggery to thwart the match, involving not one but two successive popes in devising conditions for the better treatment of English Catholics, which they knew James could never accept. The weeks turned into months.

  By late August the two sides were playing out the endgame, each still pretending the match might take place. The Spanish were exhausted by the charade, running out of money to pay for any more tournaments or feasts. The English were irritable, homesick and restless. One of Charles’s pageboys had died of heatstroke, and fights between servants and soldiers were breaking out. These were the circumstances in which the English prince sat for Velázquez.

  It is possible that the ingenious Olivares—Spain’s true ruler, it was said—personally contrived the sitting as a sop to the unwelcome guest. Perhaps it was a way of passing time or a diplomatic gesture, flattering to Charles’s refined tastes, for the prince had been buying, or trying to buy, works by Titian, Tintoretto and Leonardo from their reluctant owners all through the visit. Or perhaps it was a diplomatic gesture in reverse: Charles commissioning Philip’s new painter as a sign of respect towards Spain. At the very least it seems that simple curiosity overwhelmed Charles, as it would over and again in the decades to come: the desire to see how he appeared—to see who he was—through the eyes of a painter.

  Charles was attuned to art from childhood. His older brother, who would have become Henry IX had he not died of typhoid at eighteen, was compulsively interested in art. England’s Lost Prince, as Henry became known, built a picture gallery for the portraits of Holbein and Hilliard, and was involved in designing the first bridge across the Thames at Westmi
nster when he fell ill. His face, with its gleaming blue eyes and vivid smile beneath a tawny quiff, looks out from so many portraits by foreign artists at the English court that one has a sense of his appearance developing almost from birth. Charles was there when Henry died and so stricken with grief that he tried to resurrect his brother by commissioning a portrait from the Dutchman Daniel Mytens, which seems to conflate elements of both boys in a dreamy posthumous vision. Charles hung the painting on the wall opposite his bed, where he could see it on waking each day.

  Sickly from birth, Charles suffered from rickets and could barely walk until the age of four. As an adult, he was barely five foot three, fragile and weak, constantly trying to build himself up with strenuous hours on horseback. The early portraits by Mytens show a wary rather than confident intelligence, a narrow-shouldered youth trying to grow into the role of future king. One may easily imagine the attraction for Charles of seeing himself differently, with a Spanish beard, as he looked to this exceptional Spanish painter. The trip may be doomed, but who cares when one considers the artist who will make him honest, human and true.

  John Snare looked for any document that could give some sense of this occasion, how the sitting came about, where and when it took place. There were many accounts of the Spanish adventure in the Bodleian Library but almost nothing about this improbable encounter. In fact only two contemporary records survive, one written in English and the other in Spanish—the brief biography by Pacheco.

  The Spanish translator had by now done his work and dispatched the English version to Snare. It came as a mixed blessing. Pacheco mentions the portrait of Prince Charles, to be sure, but he is so alive to the glory of his son-in-law’s position at court that he gives no detail at all of the commission except to say, offhandedly, that Velázquez was painting the portrait of Philip IV at the time and “while doing it, he also made a study of the Prince of Wales.”

  “A study of the Prince”: it sounds so succinct, and to modern eyes many, if not most, of Velázquez’s portraits could be described as studies. But in those days there were different interpretations of the Spanish phrase—Hizo tambiẽn de camino un bosquexo del principe de Gales—each of them turning on the translation of de camino to mean “in passing.” These ranged from the juvenile idea that Velázquez just happened to see the prince passing in the street and made a quick study (un bosquexo was thus translated as “sketch,” which would hardly describe Snare’s painting) to the long-held notion that the prince was en route to somewhere else and Velázquez tagged along, presumably cramming canvas, paints and all into the carriage to make a quick likeness in one day.

  The English document is from the royal accounts for the Spanish journey. It simply records the amount the prince paid for the portrait and the date of September 8, when it was paid. Yet these numbers are vital. What this piece of parchment tells us is that Velázquez’s portrait cannot have been a quick sketch made on the street or in some carriage on a rocky road, for the amount paid was an astonishing 1,100 reales. This was an enormous sum (Pacheco gives approximately this figure in escudos, too), as much as Charles had recently spent on a painting by Dürer and considerably more than Philip himself would pay his royal painter for a portrait the following month.

  Even if the prince was in the same room as the painter for only a short time—Philip rarely gave more than an hour for the painting of his royal face—the portrait itself may have taken more than a week. Pacheco states that Velázquez was painting Philip on August 30; the English party did not leave Spain until the day after the bill for the painting was paid in September.

  Charles could have seen only one or two of Velázquez’s paintings before—The Waterseller in Fonseca’s collection, perhaps, or the likeness of Philip—and now the portrait of himself; but he must have recognized the painter’s gifts immediately to reward them so highly. This is no small insight, given that Velázquez was still a newcomer to Madrid. His art had barely been seen outside Seville and he had yet to paint those images of the Hapsburg court that would win him the accolade “king of painters and painter of kings.” It would be decades before these masterpieces were seen outside the Alcázar; generations before Velázquez’s fame spread across Europe, before collectors began to vie for his work, before Joseph Bonaparte abandoned The Waterseller on a Spanish battlefield and the Duke of Wellington found it in the blood and mire; before Richard Ford endured weeks of bumping carriages, and before Manet made his famous pilgrimage during an outbreak of cholera to see Velázquez in the Prado.

  • • •

  It is not the least of John Snare’s achievements, as his opponents would later concede, that he went to all the trouble of hiring a reputable scholar to translate Pacheco’s biography. But Snare went further, for he made it available to his fellow readers by publishing it for the first time in English. It appears as an appendix to The History and Pedigree of the Portrait of Prince Charles in 1847. To Snare’s relief, the translator did not come up with any nonsense about carriages or quickfire drawings in the street. He translated the vexed phrase un bosquexo (correctly) as “a colour oil study or sketch.”

  We know two central facts about Velázquez that Snare could not. Namely that he painted directly from his mind to the canvas without preliminary drawings; and that he left scarcely a single sheet of sketches. Some of his greatest paintings are made with astonishing freedom apparently on the wing. Las Meninas itself has been called the largest oil sketch ever painted.

  Snare may not have known any of this, but his own account of the portrait describes it in just such terms. “The handling is free in the extreme. The brush appears to have swept across the canvas and never to have paused or hesitated . . . Even when the colour is most solid it is always thin, and in many parts it looks as if it had been floated on.” How perfectly that puts the Velázquez effect.

  • • •

  In Minster Street, the painting hung in its special room, admired by one and all as a captivating image of Prince Charles. There was never any doubt about the sitter—as there would be with so many of Velázquez’s other subjects, those men in black whose identities have yet to be discovered. But nor was there any documentary proof about the painter. There was no signature or date, no label on the back of the canvas. The only evidence of Velázquez was the painting itself.

  Everything urged Snare towards Velázquez, but still he had to consider the possibility of Van Dyck, inventor of the cool Cavalier look of effortless authority, of stylish poses and languid expressions, coiner of the classic images of Charles. He must be methodic. Behind the prince was a curiously indeterminate space; this resembled nothing in Van Dyck. Next to him was a strange spherical object, a sort of spectral globe, but such things appeared in several other seventeenth-century portraits, so that was no proof one way or the other. The arm resting on what appeared to be the hilt of a sword—this looked like a Van Dyck; until Snare found other matches by much earlier painters at the court. The paint was too thin, the space too strange, the pose too natural, nothing like the suave attitudes of Van Dyck’s Cavaliers. There was a freeness and honesty and disregard for effect that the Flemish painter was altogether incapable of showing. Snare could find nothing to support the view, voiced every second day at Minster Street, that this was a Van Dyck. So he tried saying the same thing himself.

  “When I declared the painting was a Van-dyck these persons turned round and demanded that I should bring forward proofs. In short, I found that if I presumed to assert the Painting was by Van-dyck, there would be as great opposition offered as there ever was to its being the work of Velázquez.”

  If it is not by Van Dyck, then how about van der Helst, a painter celebrated in his day but bypassed in ours? Van der Helst is airy, all right, but he conveys no sense of life or character. It cannot be the merry Dutchman Honthorst because he didn’t arrive in England until long after Charles had been crowned (like Van Dyck). Perhaps it is the pensive and gracious Daniel Mytens, principal painter to King Charles until Van Dyck came to o
ust him; but Mytens never painted with such daring. Snare visits Hampton Court to look at Mytens, travels as far as Yorkshire for a portrait of Charles by Van Dyck. He goes from one painter to the next, but the slipper never fits. Everything returns him to Velázquez.

  If science can give him no proof, and there is not a scrap of documentary evidence, he can only follow the principle of Occam’s razor, which remains no less pertinent today. If nobody else could have painted this portrait as well as Velázquez, then the simplest possibility holds true: Velázquez must have painted this portrait. But the only way to confirm this is through the knowledge of one’s eyes, so Snare must go to London and look more closely at the art of Velázquez.

  5

  Man in Black

  THE PORTRAIT SHOWS a man in black staring straight back at you with a flash of electrifying intensity. He holds himself formidably still and correct. One eye is a pure black disk beneath the brow, the other a dark star glittering in the strange tawny light that flickers around him like St. Elmo’s fire.

  The image startles every time, and so does the man—silent, vigilant, acutely handsome (Plate C). The painting puts him nowhere, in a no-man’s-land of indeterminate space, surrounded by nothing but this atmospheric glow from which he looks with such penetrating directness that the past becomes the present in his glance. Only the archaic collar, stiff as a porcelain dish, returns the moment to some earlier century.

  Who is this watchful stranger? There are no clues. He does not appear in any distinct period or location; his hands are not visible making any kind of telling gesture; he wears nothing to indicate his occupation, never mind his name; and the painting has no signature or date. There is no immediate clue to his identity—or that of the artist—in the form of a symbol, a prop or a painted word, nothing in the empty brightness around him to help anyone guess who he is. Before you is a man entirely outside time and space.