Palomino identified Nieto—indeed all but one of the figures in Las Meninas—in his 1724 biography. He may have known Nieto personally, since they overlapped at the Spanish court, and he praises the tiny portrait as “very life-like, despite the distance and the reduction of scale and the light in which he is placed.”
Just as Nieto is immediately recognizable to Palomino as a miniature silhouette in a distant doorway, so the king and queen are instantly recognizable to us as thumbnail reflections in that hazy mirror; recognizable from the larger portraits, and vice versa.
Las Meninas shows friends, colleagues, princess and dwarves like figures in a dream: the people around Velázquez by day who reappear in the mind’s projections at night. And the chamberlain haunts the whole picture, with its revelation of their shared lives at court. The two friends are together, just as they were in reality, Nieto appearing alongside Velázquez in his most famous work.
Come close to A Spanish Gentleman in Apsley House and the painting discloses more of Nieto; it is not all there at first sight. The soft hair, the inner tension, the level-eyed look of tacit empathy: at a distance, every brushmark is quick with descriptive power until you draw near—and they lose their legibility. The upturned mustache ends in a whisker so fine you can scarcely see it, literally a hair’s breadth; the hair itself fades away as imperceptibly as smoke. There is a star of reflective light on the forehead so tiny that its exact shape is only visible millimeters from the surface, though its point is large, as if marking the spot where the soul lives.
Brushing that surface is a sense of movement, of breathing impermanence. This is how Nieto looked in mid-thought, in mid-life, at this moment; there is no straining after the definitive. The man is here, supremely conjured in paint, but the picture does not give all of him because there is always more within him. He is allowed his privacy, his secrecy, his full mystery as a man, which is the respect Velázquez gives all of his sitters. Monarchs, chamberlains, watersellers, dwarves: they are all sovereign of themselves.
6
The Talk of London
If you write to anyone in London, recommend their going to see a magnificent portrait of Charles the First when Prince. There is so much spirit and youthfulness that it is quite free from the sadness of the Van Dycks . . . It is the finest picture I have ever seen.
Mary Russell Mitford, 1847
JOHN SNARE EVENTUALLY became sufficiently confident of his discovery to show the painting—and a tantalizing fragment of evidence concerning its past—to the well-known novelist Mary Russell Mitford. Miss Mitford was to Reading what Jane Austen was to Bath, a profoundly shrewd observer of the public and private lives of men and women in the microcosm of provincial society. Her fictional Belford Regis was a portrait of Reading in deft sketches, its lawyers and doctors, colonels, parsons and landed gentry, its matchmaking, parlor games and election campaigns, all depicted with a spry eloquence that made her books popular throughout the country. In London her plays were performed at Covent Garden and her circle of admirers included the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, with whom she corresponded and to whom she confided her excitement on seeing Snare’s picture. This portrait of Charles, she enthused, was not just the standard silken Cavalier, destiny inscribed in his every feature, repeated in grand houses all over Britain. One of her own stories features a hack copying just such a Van Dyck, until he, too, can pull off that look of elegant melancholy with a hint of decadence to satisfy his credulous customers.
Not only did Miss Mitford know about painting, she was an expert on the man in the portrait. Her Charles the First: An Historical Tragedy in Five Acts premiered to acclaim in 1832, and she had studied images of the royal face at least as obsessively as Snare. She agreed that none of the existing pictures looked quite like this one; and none seemed to show him both newly bearded and young, as he was in Madrid. Miss Mitford had no doubt whatsoever that this was the desideratum of English historians as mentioned by Palomino—the long-lost Velázquez, the missing portrait of Prince Charles.
Snare took heart, and he had another reason for optimism. In the quest to uncover a past for the painting, he had come across an antiquarian’s account of London that made passing mention of an unusual portrait by Velázquez hanging in Fife House in Whitehall in 1794. Perhaps this would be the very same painting! (Snare permits himself only this one excited exclamation mark in his account of what followed.) But where could he find corroborating evidence—a print, maybe, a sale record or at the very least a written description? This is where the search forks in different directions.
I looked where he looked, searching through the pages of old newspapers and books, through auction house records and catalogues marked up with prices and blotted with ink, handled and creased where a person from the past has shoved it in his pocket at the end of a sale, triumphant or disenchanted. These are social documents and curiously intimate in their annotations—too high, only passable, surely not, a poor copy! They capture the moment when paintings surface in public, liberated from private houses, before disappearing once more, and they sometimes catch the reaction as well. But I had what Snare did not, a library with a computerized index, and could immediately find the vital document that he did not come across for half a year. An old bibliographer’s manual tipped him off to a catalogue of paintings at Fife House written and published in 1797 by the 2nd Earl Fife himself. And there, among the parade of kings, queens and aristocrats hanging in the corridors and galleries, was the unusual portrait by “Valasky” (in the earl’s Scottish brogue): “Charles I when still a prince, painted in Madrid.”
The painting existed, the painting survived; and what’s more, just to cancel one fear from Snare’s anxious list, it had not been quietly abandoned in Spain after the disastrous campaign, but had returned with the prince to England. How it entered Fife House, or Radley Hall half a century later, remained so far unknown; but the worldly Miss Mitford had no concerns about the odd ways in which paintings changed hands. She urged Snare to be less hesitant in setting the picture—legitimately acquired, after all—before a larger public. And thus it came to be displayed, in the spring of 1847, at 21 Old Bond Street in London.
This Mayfair address was the very squeak of chic, then as now, a place to be seen and spend money. It already had a long career in satire, particularly in the acid-bitten etchings of the cartoonist James Gillray, who lived about twenty yards away from what is now Chanel, in the early 1800s. Gillray hardly had to step from his front door to witness every passing fashion in that most fashionable of streets: those towering quiffs and wasp waists, extruded sideburns and bulging breeches that became the early elements of his style. Sitting at his window, he drew directly from life: the king’s mistress in rib-crushing corsets; Prime Minister Pitt with his woodpecker nose; James Duff, who would one day inherit the title to become the 4th Earl Fife, mincing along in dainty pumps tied with satin ribbons: “All Bond-street Trembled as He Strode.”
Fortunes were made and lost on Old Bond Street. Art buyers (and sellers) were fooled. Some dealers showed phony pictures that brought the newspapers out in ecstatic chorus, others displayed authentic masterpieces that died a death of indifference. For anybody hoping to make a painting pay its way, the risk was as high as the rents.
In Mayfair, art was drama. A painting might be for sale, but it could also double as a spectacle that required publicity and tickets. John Wilson ran his European Museum as an ever-changing theater of Old Masters, genuine Holbeins alongside blatantly fake Titians, taking enough money at the box office to keep the cast of artists constantly refreshed. Stanley’s Rooms in Old Bond Street specialized in sensational pictures; Rubens’s bosomy Susanna Fourment, smiling beneath her famous straw hat, had its first London showing there. The two Englishmen who had purchased it in Belgium also tried and failed to sell it to George IV, but so many visitors paid half a crown to see the sultry beauty that the proprietors made their money back in two months.
Paintings had to compete with the wildest of
attractions. At William Bullock’s Egyptian Hall on Piccadilly, 220,000 visitors came to gaze at Napoleon’s bulletproof carriage, an ingenious mobile home that could be configured as a kitchen, bathroom or study and still contained Boney’s steel bed. Bullock bought the carriage from the king, who got it from the Prussian major who had captured it at Waterloo—an investment returned forty-fold, with a staggering £35,000 taken in tickets. But Bullock would just as readily invite Géricault to display The Raft of the Medusa in the same venue, all expenses paid, after that devastating vision of shipwreck, starvation and drowning had failed to impress viewers at the Paris Salon. Presented in the right light, and at the right height—low down, so that the waves rose menacingly high—the immense painting electrified its British audience.
The Egyptian Hall was a sign of the times. Turner had shows there, and so did the highly respectable Society of Painters in Watercolour. A Victorian visitor could stand before a Leonardo saint, but he could also gawp at Captain Tom Thumb on his European “Midget-Tour” in 1844. “The greatest little man on earth,” produced by P. T. Barnum, was a far bigger hit than Leonardo.
When John Snare rented the room on the second floor of 21 Old Bond Street in March 1847 he was in the right place at the right time with the right painting: a lost portrait of a lost monarch (as Charles seemed then to romantic Victorians) by an artist whose genius was still new to the British public. The staging was meticulous. After paying a shilling, visitors passed up a staircase muffled with carpets, through heavy drapes and into a cell-like space enclosed by carved wooden screens, where they came face-to-face with the masterpiece, illuminated by gas as the day faded into dusk. It was exactly as a modern curator might present a Velázquez: in silence, beautifully lit and without any visual distractions. If Snare wanted people to be awestruck, these were ideal conditions. The press response was immediate.
The Times was powerfully impressed, describing the event as a “superb encounter” with the incomparable Velázquez. The Morning Chronicle was enchanted. “The flesh of the face is brilliantly executed . . . a warm and liquid transparency makes the countenance glow like magic.” The Illustrated London News hailed it as a splendid historical find. “This single painting,” ran its editorial, with a sideswipe at Bullock and all, “is worth a whole Exhibition of yesterday’s novelties.”
Correspondents from newspapers all over Britain began to arrive and offer their praise. Snare kept every cutting. The eulogies would appear, like the press raves outside Broadway shows—astonishing, mesmerizing, unique—on the handbills that promoted the portrait on its subsequent adventures. And with the press came the public, beginning with the figures of fashion, the lords and ladies and society hostesses of Mayfair, the peers of the realm and the members of the House of Commons who walked up from Westminster to take a look and then dine at the grand houses of St James’s. The intelligentsia followed; the Brownings came from Wimpole Street, bringing their friends. Soho dealers arrived, and the professors, lawyers and classical scholars, the historians and antiquarians of the Camden Society, of which Snare was now a member, lending probity and gravitas to his case. And the Duke of Wellington, only just retired from political life, visited not once but twice, bringing a whole section of London society in his wake.
But of all the grandees who visited the show, the most gratifying to Snare was not the Iron Duke, but a Spaniard who had firsthand knowledge of Velázquez in the most intimate circumstances imaginable: the Count of Montemolin, claimant to the Spanish throne.
The count, who styled himself Carlos VI, was born in the Royal Palace in Madrid and had grown up with the portraits of Velázquez. But he was now a socialite in exile from a civil war so brief and halfhearted that historians have wondered whether it amounted to a war at all, provoked in 1846 by a battle over whether women should succeed to the Spanish throne. The attempt to restore the (male) Carlist line failed; and the rest of Montemolin’s short life was spent wandering aimlessly through Europe.
The count sent word that he would visit on Friday, June 11, red-letter day, and sure enough this dapper Spaniard arrived on cue with his entourage: the Velázquez expert coming to pronounce on the Velázquez.
Snare was so anxious not to interfere with the count’s response, and so concerned to hear it spontaneously spoken, that he hid behind one of the screens. The reaction exceeded all hope. “His Highness having attentively surveyed the portrait was pleased to express himself much gratified. He entertained no doubt whatsoever as to the author, whom he pronounced to be Velázquez.”
As if this was not enough, the count’s chief equerry, Don Juan de Montenegro, also long familiar with the paintings in Madrid, saw Velázquez’s hand everywhere in the painting. He drew Snare’s particular attention to a close passage of impressionistic brushwork. “He asked me if I saw anything extraordinary in the white collar about the Prince’s neck, adding that the loose and feathery touches that somehow produce the effect of embroidery are characteristic.”
These two men—these two Spaniards who knew Velázquez’s work from first to last, who had seen his portraits early and late—confirmed it as a true Velázquez.
• • •
To believe in a painting amounted to an act of faith in Snare’s day. There was no visual proof to sustain an opinion other than the painting itself, no X-rays, no photographs, no chemical analysis of paints. One could not unmask a fake or demote a painting by showing that the canvas or the pigments were too modern. Experience and judgment were all; and even now this remains the case. When every other piece of evidence complies with one’s idea of what a painting might be, but there is no documentary support, experts must rely upon their eyes.
The London show was a test of the bookseller and the portrait alike. Snare held two beliefs about his picture that were infrangibly bound: that it showed Charles as a young prince, but with the beard grown in Spain; and that it was by Velázquez. Now his conviction that this was the lost portrait had the endorsement of two unrivaled Spanish experts.
The only snag was that their opinion came too late to protect him.
If the bookseller had not advertised the portrait as “the Velázquez” it is possible that he might not have suffered what followed, but in April the Fine Arts Journal published an all-out attack. The writer’s scorn seems to have built up like steam emitting through a spout, as a result of all the previous press praise. He took Snare’s syllogism apart. The picture was not necessarily Charles, and therefore not by Velázquez; and if not Velázquez, then probably Van Dyck (not that any of this follows). Perhaps a studio assistant had been involved, too, for there had been “much injudicious tampering with the left hand.”
The scoffing continued in the letters page of the next edition:
A picture purchased in the neighbourhood of Oxford for some eight or nine pounds . . . is surrounded with decoration costing some fifty times the price given for the picture itself, and the field is taken at the commencement of the London season with an intention of selling the work for a sum that shall amply recompense the pains taken by the speculator. The undertaking has two points in its favour. First, the gullibility of the public; second, the influence of the press. But the press knows nothing.
The letter was signed: A LOOKER-ON.
The attacks were ad hominem: a little man from the provinces who doesn’t know the price of proper pictures, who thinks he can con the great city with his carpets and screens (on which, incidentally, Snare had spent nothing, having borrowed them from his landlord) with the aim of flogging the portrait when the circus is over. Who does he think he is?
Scenting class war, the press immediately weighed in against the Fine Arts Journal on behalf of the tradesman who had the gall to think he had chanced on a Velázquez. The Morning Post, Britain’s bestselling daily paper, published its outrage first. “Spanish it decidedly is, and there is no question as to the person for whom it was made. The treatment is so original . . . That it is the production of Velázquez is not to be disputed.” One public
ation after another came out strongly in favor of the Velázquez—fifty-one in all. Some went so far as to thank the bookseller in person. “We wish Mr Snare every success . . . for had he not upheld the character of the painting it would have been buried in oblivion and the world deprived of this unique produce of so eminent an artist as Velázquez.”
What such a picture might look like, however, was a subject almost too nebulous to address. The first half of the nineteenth century was a virtual wasteland for anyone wishing to learn about the art of Velázquez in the press. Journalists mentioned him with reverence, but scarcely attempted to characterize his work in any way, and it was hard to form a coherent idea from the few works on public display.
The earliest outings were at the British Institution in Pall Mall. The Boar Hunt, that wide and washy panorama studded with minuscule figures—the king and Olivares immediately recognizable in Velázquez’s deft shorthand—had been shown in 1819, followed by Baltasar Carlos in the Riding School two years later. Baltasar, the little prince who would die so young, before his seventeenth birthday, whose face does not look Spanish, whose little horse is not heroic and whose doting parents are miniaturized far away in the distance, must have been as unrepresentative a first encounter with Velázquez as The Boar Hunt. From these paintings the visitor might have imagined him to be an artist of the great outdoors, or of teeny horses and hounds. It can hardly be coincidence that auctioneers of this period were trying to sell miniatures “by” Velázquez.
The Vanishing Velázquez Page 7