The Vanishing Velázquez

by Laura Cumming

  I stand where Snare once stood, on exactly the same spot, looking at the very same image. The bookseller was here in the 1840s, and so was the portrait. A period watercolor exists of the gallery with all the paintings in their exact positions, the Velázquez in tiny thumbnail by the door where it still hangs today. Snare and I see the same portrait in the same place, centuries apart, but he has no idea who he is looking at, whereas I do. I have seen this person in Las Meninas.

  The man in black hangs in the muffled warmth of the Waterloo Gallery in Apsley House in London. Snare was right to go there, for this grand Georgian building on the green verges of Hyde Park contained more genuine works by Velázquez than practically any other in England at that time. These paintings once belonged to the King of Spain, but now they belonged to the Duke of Wellington, who lived at Apsley House. How they got there is one of the most violent misadventures in art.

  • • •

  Wellington had no idea who or what he was looking at when they brought the portrait out into the hot Spanish light. He was as exhausted as his troops. They had been nearly a year pursuing Napoleon’s elder brother, Joseph Bonaparte, out of Madrid—where he had usurped the Spanish king—through the country towards the French border. Clashing and regrouping, steadily losing men, weathering a long winter in the freezing sierra, the British had finally caught up with the fleeing French at the Basque town of Vitoria. On June 21, 1813, Wellington’s soldiers battered away all day until the enemy lines finally broke apart and the surviving French ran away. Vitoria was the decisive battle of the Peninsular War, bringing an end to Napoleonic rule over Spain.

  Somehow the portrait survived this terrible onslaught. The British found it in Bonaparte’s own carriage in a long baggage train of wagons and carts abandoned by the fleeing French. It had been removed from the royal palace in Madrid, along with many other masterpieces thieved from Spanish collections. A chosen few, including five Raphaels and a Leonardo, were judged worthy of the risk to human life and made it all the way to Paris unscathed. The rest were abruptly jettisoned.

  The paintings found in Bonaparte’s baggage had been removed from their frames, wrapped flat or rolled up like scrolls. Some were in wooden crates, but others were unprotected and a few had even been used as protection themselves, laid like tarpaulins over pack-carrying mules. Among them was another work by Velázquez—a picture of an old man selling water.

  Who painted the portrait of the man in black? Some people thought Caravaggio. But Wellington himself was skeptical. Dispatching the hoard of paintings for safekeeping to his brother in London, he wrote dismissively: “They are not thought to be of any value.” In London, however, the president of the Royal Academy took the opposite view. Benjamin West was exultant in his praise of these spoils of war. “The Correggio and the Giulio Romano ought to be framed in diamonds,” he gloated, imagining a triumphant display. “It was worth fighting the battle just for them!”

  Ten thousand men died in the bloodshed at Vitoria.

  • • •

  Among the paintings left behind in the Basque landscape was a small oak panel that Velázquez knew well, Jan Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait of 1434: the rich couple with the dog, the oranges and the wooden shoes, touching hands in an expensive bedroom, a convex mirror shining on the wall behind them. Velázquez lived with this masterpiece for almost forty years, latterly as keeper of the royal collection. What ingenious use the Flemish painter made of his mirror, a way of introducing reflections of the outer world where we stand (and of the artist, minutely reflected) into the scene. Van Eyck’s idea had its echo two centuries later in Las Meninas.

  The Arnolfini Portrait vanished from Vitoria and was not glimpsed again until 1816, when a Scottish soldier named James Hay offered the picture to the future George IV, claiming to have fallen in love with it in the Brussels bedroom where he lay recuperating from wounds sustained at Waterloo. George foolishly turned it down. Hay, needless to say, was there at Vitoria.

  • • •

  A London dealer named William Seguier was hired to look after the paintings from Spain. The first keeper of the National Gallery, as he would shortly become, identified them in a catalogue written for Wellington’s brother, who couldn’t resist forwarding it to the duke with a jibe, pointing out just how wrong he had been. This was in fact “a most valuable collection of pictures, one which you could not conceive.” The sum of £40,000 had already been mooted, although President West believed the value was simply unimaginable.

  Wellington—who loathed looting—did not want to set a bad example himself and immediately instructed the British ambassador in Madrid to inform the Spanish king that his pictures could be collected. There was no reply. A year passed; then another. Wellington led the victory at Waterloo. And still there was no reply. Eventually he raised the question himself through the Spanish ambassador in London, who sent this discreet response: “His Majesty, touched by your delicacy, does not wish to deprive you of that which has come into your possession by means as just as they are honourable. I believe you ought to let the matter rest where it stands and refer to it no longer.”

  By such accidents of war, and such teasing diplomatic niceties, eighty-one of the paintings found in Bonaparte’s baggage train came to reside at Apsley House, otherwise known as Number One London.

  • • •

  How to identify the man in black? William Seguier got closer to the truth than anyone before him. Portrait of a Spanish Gentleman was the modest but accurate title he gave the Velázquez (as he knew it to be). This might seem obvious now, but for centuries the painting had been misidentified in the very place where it hung: the Spanish royal palace.

  Titles are a comparatively modern invention. Before the nineteenth century few paintings were known by anything more precise or expressive than the bluntest description. The Laughing Cavalier was “Portrait of a Man” (incontrovertible), The Night Watch was “The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq” (banal), Las Meninas was “The Family of Philip IV” (bizarre) before it got its present title on entering the Prado. It has also been referred to as “The Artist’s Studio” and “Her Royal Highness the Empress”; each title shifts the emphasis, reflecting the priorities of those who confer it.

  Until 1794 the portrait found at Vitoria was known as “Gentleman in a Golilla,” after the cardboard collar that was supposed to stay stiff for months and thus aid Spain’s failing economy by saving on starch. Then, in an inventory signed by Goya, who ought to have known better, the picture is no longer by Velázquez and its subject is the notoriously cruel politician Antonio Pérez, who died when the painter was a child. What did Goya see in this beautiful portrait that could be construed as ruthlessness, or was he just signing off in haste? Inventories that ought to be meticulous often turn out to be random, slapdash and human—the same prejudices and errors compounded down the centuries.

  After Pérez, the man in black was identified as the great Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón, Velázquez’s colleague and contemporary, and a plausible identification, given the acute intelligence of the face; or perhaps he was Alonso Cano, a fellow painter known for his violent temper. From here it was a short step to Velázquez: for who could be making such intense eye contact with the viewer, if not the artist himself?

  This claim has been bizarrely popular over the years, given that the man in black looks nothing like the only certain self-portrait we have. But Velázquez left several paintings of dark-eyed men with (and without) beards, all of which have been enthusiastically identified as self-portraits despite the evidence of that face looking back from Las Meninas.

  In the past, before prints or photographs of the painting were widely available, there was little evidence to dispel such fantasies; and yet they linger. This reticent man who refused to impose himself upon history with wild anecdotes or outlandish behavior, who does not step forward from behind the canvas, who does not make a show of his person except through his painting: for some people, this is not enough. There ha
s to be another Velázquez, and surely he must be disguised as one of these nameless men; though in the case of this portrait, the gentleman has a name. He, too, is called Velázquez.

  José Nieto Velázquez was a lifelong colleague at the court. He arrived not long after the painter and they worked together until Velázquez’s death. At one stage they had the same title: Nieto was chamberlain to the queen, Velázquez chamberlain to the king, the pinnacle of a courtier’s career at the Alcázar.

  When Velázquez came from Seville in 1623, the palace had 167 huntsmen to look after horses and sports, 300 guards and a corps de ballet of 350 servants to dance attendance on the monarchs and keep the Alcázar in perpetual motion. There were servants to dress and undress the king’s person, to bring and remove his gloves and his dinner plates, to usher guests to and from his royal presence. A French visitor observed the frozen ritual: “All his actions and all his occupations are always the same and move with such regularity that, day by day, he knows exactly what he will do for the rest of his life.”

  As the performance, so, too, the performer: Philip’s fixed and impassive deportment shocked dignitaries from abroad. The king was to be approached only through a succession of rooms, each more private than the last, and thus more exclusive, until visitors sufficiently important would come upon His Majesty standing by a table in the final chamber. He would raise his hat as they entered, place it upon the table and then remain motionless throughout the audience. His expression never changed. When he uttered, only his tongue moved; Philip was the statue that spoke.

  This is exactly how Velázquez presents him in the early court portraits: stock-still and speechless, his authoritative hat upon the table. He is young and uncertain. Velázquez sees and paints him this way in fascination, without servility, and his fascination soon finds an unprecedented pictorial expression. It happens quite quickly, between one full-length portrait and the next. The line where the floor meets the wall disappears so that the king dominates the space, anchored only by his own shadow. The architecture becomes irrelevant. This is how we see people, after all, not as dolls in boxes but as people alive and breathing in the same atmosphere as we. Velázquez’s idea would change the history of painting.

  Velázquez’s portraits of Philip are the most remarkable biography of a monarch in all art, spanning his life from the hesitance of youth to the melancholy disillusion of age. The lugubrious face thickens, the eyes sag, the dangling jaw takes on a foolish pathos. Only the mustache, whose upswept prongs were imitated by Salvador Dalí, remains forever vital. Philip grieves for his dead children; the ship of state runs aground; Velázquez understands. Even if one did not know it from the paintings, the bond between the king and the painter was so strong that it provoked envy.

  Pacheco boasted that Philip would give his painter as many as three hours for a sitting—unheard of in the annals of the Alcázar—and that he had both a back route and a key to Velázquez’s rooms. These sessions were a time out of time. The king is described as holding his power in abeyance when he posed. Even a child and a dog are reported to have held still for Velázquez, such was his effect upon each and every sitter. And Velázquez finds the king no less ordinary, or extraordinary, than anyone else. His gaze is steady and consistent. He sees the intelligence, and the weakness, in Philip; the dignity in the waterseller; he paints Count-Duke Olivares as a great statesman who may also be a bully.

  Olivares was Velázquez’s first champion at the court (and Velázquez would be the last to paint him when he fell from grace). He, too, was from Seville and had brought many allies from home when he became prime minister in 1623. His control of Philip was absolute, from determining foreign policy to enforcing austerity measures, such as the golilla, as the economy foundered and there was no money for starched collars, let alone banquets. The people in these paintings are all surviving on credit.

  Olivares is a formidable presence in the art of Velázquez, an imperious and choleric statesman erect in his stupendous girth, often mastering some defiant stallion that bears the brunt of his weight. Alone and in crowds, he is so familiar through these paintings—which hung alongside those of the king himself in the Alcázar—that one recognizes those kiss curls, mustachios and double chins even at a huge distance or on the tiniest of scales: overbearing at any size.

  No matter that Spain was sinking into debt, its coffers at times so empty there was not enough money for firewood, the court still continued at its glacial pace, observing every hierarchical formality, every tortuous detail of etiquette. Spain was at war with Portugal, and fighting against its own citizens in the north, yet still there were standards to uphold and intense battles over court appointments. When one position came free—the undersecretary in charge of supervising the rituals for dinner, say—there might be twenty applicants fighting for the role, even in the knowledge that they might never see the salary rise. Palace wages were sometimes years in arrears (a surviving document shows Velázquez appealing for overdue payments early on in his career), but still the masque must continue. Calderón’s latest play must be staged; the French ambassador must be entertained with fireworks and music; courtiers must take part in elaborate dramas with complicated sets lit by thousands of candles. The number of courses at dinner might be reduced, to reflect the impoverished state of Spain, but only from seventeen to ten.

  Velázquez, involved in these theatrical entertainments, in turn conceived new ways to theatricalize not just the pictures of his friends and colleagues, but more remarkably the portraits of the king, his wife and children. His painting of Philip’s four-year-old heir, Baltasar Carlos in the Riding School, revolutionizes the conventional equestrian portrait, not least by putting a little child upon a charger. Baltasar is shown in action, front of stage, one hand bravely at his hip while the other holds the reins, so close that he seems to rear into our space.

  Dwarves and courtiers—including the tiny Olivares, who has one eye on the audience outside the painting while accepting a ceremonial lance from the prince’s aide—observe from the heat and dust behind, while far in the distance, raised high on a balcony like a box at the opera, the king and queen preside over the whole scenario. And behold! Everyone turns our way. A brilliant allegory of watching and looking, of society as spectacle, it seems to prefigure Las Meninas two decades in advance.

  Velázquez accepted court positions that took him away from art all through his life. His industry as a royal servant is distressing to this day, since it speaks of all the pictures he never had time to paint. “The diligence of a bee,” wrote Palomino. How can one not think of him as shackled by protocol, perpetually unfree as he ascends from Privy Chamber to superintendent of private works and eventually to king’s high chamberlain, Holder of the Palace Key that one sees tucked into his belt in Las Meninas? “Palaces are tombs,” wrote the contemporary playwright Lope de Vega, “and if they had feelings, I would be sorry for the very figures in the palace tapestries.”

  Yet the truth is that Velázquez aimed for social advancement just as much as his colleague Nieto, who never ceased to apply for these posts. He must have known he was a great painter, but he struggled to become a great courtier instead, angling year after year for the red cross, emblem of the high order of the Knights of Santiago, which finally appears painted on his tunic in Las Meninas.

  But for all this scaling of the rungs, he scarcely surfaces in the royal archives as a person as opposed to a job title, and when he does it is often poignant: the one line he was given in the palace masque in 1638; the demeaning seat in the gods at the royal bullfight.

  These archives are dense with material details: the number of logs needed, and the loan required to pay for them (Velázquez himself stumped up the money one winter); the cleaning of pearls; the bills for eggplants and mustard. One hundred pairs of gloves stitched in finest leather as a parting gift to the Prince of Wales in 1623, to wave him off (or away).

  Yet it is also here that one sees the relationship between Velázquez and Nieto materiali
zing through the minutiae. The two colleagues are involved in ceremonial dinners, in travel plans, in the arrangement of furniture and paintings. In 1627 Velázquez was working with Nieto’s wife on that inventory of possessions belonging to Juan de Fonseca at his death. She valued the linen, he valued the paintings, which included The Waterseller of Seville.

  Which John Snare also saw—marveling at its depth of darkness and brilliant light—in the Waterloo Gallery.

  • • •

  Apsley House is an Olympian version of a gentleman’s club. Here is Canova’s three-meter statue of Napoleon standing naked in the stairwell, presented to the Duke of Wellington by the British public as a droll memento of his victory over tiny Boney at Waterloo. Here is the immense dining table with its solid-silver victory-girl statues, one for each medaled guest at military dinners. The rooms are hung floor to ceiling with portraits of the loyal officers, colonels and generals who fought alongside him, preeminently the pictures rescued in Spain. It is well said that Wellington’s picture collection was founded on the fields of Vitoria.

  Nieto and The Waterseller hang on either side of the entrance to the Waterloo Gallery, with its yellowing blinds and filtered light. They have been there for two centuries now, all the way through Wellington’s time as prime minister and the downturn in his political career when he became so unpopular that iron shutters were erected to protect the gallery windows against the assaults of rioting Londoners—said to be one origin of his nickname, the Iron Duke.

  The Waterseller is in plain view. The portrait of Nieto is just behind a door, and further guarded by the cautious label: “A Spanish Gentleman, Probably José Nieto.” In the absence of written evidence, historians are reluctant to trust their own eyes.

  For the man seen here, close and large as life, dressed in black and silhouetted in a rectangle of glowing light, reappears in miniature at the back of Las Meninas—he is the chamberlain in black, framed in another rectangle of glowing light in the doorway. Nieto is ten or maybe fifteen years older there, the face heavier and the hair now receding, this time portrayed in his last and most prestigious court role—standing on the threshold of this little life that we see, waiting to usher us into the next world.