The Vanishing Velázquez

by Laura Cumming

  Most of the genuine paintings were locked up in country houses—The Toilet of Venus at Rokeby Hall, Juan de Pareja at Longford Castle—or the mansions of the metropolis, such as Apsley House. But persistence and politesse sometimes opened closed doors. One of the world’s first female art historians, Anna Brownell Jameson, wrote a companion guide to the private galleries of London in 1844, with tips on how to inveigle your way in (Snare stocked the book in his shop). The golden mile is Mayfair.

  Jameson goes to see a Velázquez “self-portrait” at Lansdowne House, procured for the Marquess of Lansdowne via a middleman during the Peninsular War. A dark-eyed Spaniard wearing a golilla, the portrait makes a strong eye-to-eye connection. But the sitter is round-cheeked, snub-nosed, with short puffs of baby hair; to anyone who had ever seen Las Meninas (practically nobody in Britain, of course), this was plainly not Velázquez.

  At Bridgewater House, Lord Egerton has a Velázquez portrait of Philip IV of Spain (fake) and another of the bastard son of Olivarez (not the bastard, not Velázquez). In the Duke of Sutherland’s collection at Stafford House, Jameson sees a landscape with figures that might just possibly be by Velázquez (but is in fact by the Dutchman Albert Cuyp). At Grosvenor House, which you could scarcely get into without knowing the Duke of Westminster in person, Jameson admires Baltasar Carlos in the Riding School and finds another Velázquez self-portrait: “Himself, in a cap and feather, head only.” This will turn out to be Rembrandt.

  One sharp-eyed visitor spotted the Rembrandt for what it was at the time, however—none other than Snare himself.

  • • •

  These confusions about how Velázquez’s paintings should look, about who or what they represented, arose out of ignorance and inexperience. There were simply not enough works outside Spain. Painted copies were helpful, but how could one see that mysterious hand at work if not in an actual Velázquez? Las Meninas was the transcendent example: there were no photographs to give a sense of its mysterious beauty, and prints, beyond the ostensible subject, could communicate almost nothing of his style. Goya’s attempt to make an etching of a painting that obsessed him fell so disastrously short that he wrecked the plate. More or less the only available print, made in the eighteenth century by a Frenchman who had never seen the original and was working from someone else’s sketch, reduced the girls to puppets and the dwarves to boggle-eyed trolls.

  Even in Spain Velázquez’s masterpiece was scarcely seen. From 1656, when it was painted, to the nineteenth century, when it was set free, Las Meninas moved only through a few closed corridors, from the king’s semi-subterranean offices to the queen’s bedroom to the royal dining quarters. Diplomats, papal nuncios and foreign dignitaries occasionally saw it, but even quite senior Spanish noblemen only glimpsed it “muy paso”—in passing. Until 1819, when the doors of the Prado opened to the public, the number of people outside court circles who had ever seen this greatest of all paintings must have been tiny.

  So it was that a young Englishman visiting Madrid in 1814 came to believe he had bought Velázquez’s first version of Las Meninas, somewhat smaller but no less magical—not that he had any idea of the original. The MP William Bankes was following in the footsteps of his friend Byron on a European journey that would last for eight years. He had inherited enough money to buy art wherever he went and managed to secure this prized Velázquez with huge difficulty in Spain, sending it back home to Kingston Lacy, the Dorset manor he was transforming, room by room and tile by tile, into an Italian palazzo. Bankes had dreamed up a scheme for a Spanish Room, and when he finally returned to England Las Meninas took its rightful position above the fireplace in this gallery lined with gold-blocked leather.

  The little Meninas had once belonged to Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, a hero of the Spanish Enlightenment and minister in the late eighteenth-century government of Charles IV. He had seen the original more than once in the palace, so one might find it surprising that he was so certain he had a true Velázquez. It is not just that the picture is smaller, as preliminary versions often are—though of course Velázquez did not make any—or that it is tighter and brighter in some places, but slacker and coarser in others. The princess is smaller, there are not enough colors on the palette for the picture and, above all, the mirror—that glimmering surface in which the king and queen are reflected, and our presence, too, implied until the end of time—this quicksilver surface contains nothing and no one. It is blank. The picture is a copy.

  Bankes did not know this. More piercingly, he does not seem to have known when he bought it that the original still existed and was hanging only a few streets from his lodgings in Madrid. He loved the picture he owned, and even when he learned that it was probably what the Velázquez expert Sir William Stirling Maxwell tactfully called “a small repetition,” his passion survived the judgment. The picture was no less real or potent for him because it was by another artist.

  It still hangs above the fireplace at Kingston Lacy, next to the portrait of a shrewd but uneasy young cardinal dressed in blue velvet that Bankes bought in Rome. This picture, although he didn’t know it, really was a Velázquez.

  • • •

  It might have gone on for who knows how long, this Old Bond Street show, but disaster struck towards the end of autumn 1847. While Snare was out, the freeholders of number 21 entered the premises and took away the portrait.

  Snare had always paid his rent on time to the landlord, William Higgins. But Higgins was—or claimed to be—badly in debt to the freeholders, whose existence he had never once mentioned. The portrait was seized as an asset in lieu. Poor Snare, who owed nothing at all, lost his treasured possession.

  If this happened nowadays, of course, there would be intensive press coverage and a flood of legal actions. The price of the painting would be relentlessly hyped. Dealers would emphasize its rarity; insurers would discuss liability; conservators would be consulted on television about the consequences for the canvas. And every time Snare is separated from his picture, one wonders about its safety as an object, men lugging it about, propping it against walls, tying it up with rope and brown paper as they did in Old Bond Street, particles of paint shedding like skin cells in transit. The disintegration of paintings far younger than this one was common: faces had been known to fall from Joshua Reynolds’s portraits during the sitters’ own lifetimes.

  Snare wrote plaintive letters to the freeholders and even published a pamphlet in protest, but still they were intent on putting the kidnapped picture up for sale. The only way he could get it back was by settling Higgins’s debts himself, to the tune of £400. He could no longer afford to keep the London show open and retreated, wounded, back to Reading with the painting.

  Evidently he did not forget the injustice. Among the items up for debate in the House of Commons on February 18, 1848, I found a “Petition for Exemption from Distraint as it Affects Works of Art” lodged by Mr. John Snare. Its hopeless passage is recorded in Hansard. Perhaps the politicians thought he was bothering them with a trivial matter, perhaps they were eager to move rapidly to the tabled discussion of the Revolution in France. At any rate, there was no response; his petition was left on the table.

  But the newspapers took the side of the little man once more. The Morning Post ran an editorial deploring the “virtual plundering of a deserving individual” and decrying a law that discriminated against art, as if it were no different from the carpets and screens. The Velázquez got another helpful push, and there were calls for the portrait to be purchased for the nation. But by now there was serious opposition, too. The picture had acquired two powerful detractors in the art experts Sir Edmund Head and William Stirling Maxwell.

  Head was the author of the life of Velázquez in the bestselling Penny Cyclopedia. In his gently expressed opinion, the prince looked a little too old to be courting the infanta, so that the portrait might not have been painted in Spain; he was not certain, moreover, that all parts were definitely by the same painter.

  Stirling M
axwell was far less cautious.

  A Scotsman of exceptional dynamism and intellect, Sir William Stirling Maxwell (his final title) was an MP, antiquarian, philanthropist, bibliographer, breeder of shorthorn cows and shire horses, rector of the University of Glasgow and all-round polymath who spoke several languages and was the most knowledgeable and experienced commentator on Spanish art in the country. He was rich enough to travel widely, gathering his own collection of Spanish art, and had written three books on the subject before he was thirty. One of them changed the course of art writing forever. In Annals of the Artists of Spain, Stirling Maxwell did something that had never been done before: he inserted reproductions into the text. Hazy grey talbotypes of six paintings by Velázquez appear alongside the words; it is the first photographically illustrated art book.

  Published in 1848, the Annals is also a superbly eloquent work, in which Stirling Maxwell proposes—no doubt to their owners’ delight—more than seventy paintings supposedly by Velázquez in British collections. Since the Prado had opened with not even fifty, Britain would have been practically awash. The Earl of Elgin’s poodle sniffing its bone is here, and the preposterous bagpipe player (with a question mark at least), but the portrait of Prince Charles is not. Stirling Maxwell cannot believe that this portrait could possibly have been done in such a short time, as it looks “more than three parts finished.” He does not think that the prince looks twenty-three or that the artist is Velázquez.

  Yet he acknowledges that opinions are only opinions. “In artistic criticism, nothing is certain but vaguest uncertainty and irreconcilable difference. No position is so strong that it may not be assailed.” Edmund Head, for instance, had only recently given a public lecture announcing that The Waterseller of Seville was not by Velázquez at all.

  Some of the claims in the Annals were risky even in 1848. Stirling Maxwell mentions Sir Robert Walpole, who believed he had the original portrait of Pope Innocent, when the real thing was where it had always been, in Rome. The 4th Earl of Carlisle had a portrait of Juan de Pareja that wasn’t authentic, and a portrait of Baltasar that was (but which he thought was by Correggio). The real Juan de Pareja, now the pride of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, once belonged to the diplomat Sir William Hamilton, who brought it back from Naples along with his wife, Emma, and her lover, Lord Nelson. After its sale in 1801, a hundred more of the Spaniard’s “rare” creations would come on the market in the next ten years. Only two were by Velázquez.

  Yet some of the least probable candidates appear in Stirling Maxwell’s book nonetheless—scenes of Venice by candlelight, a head of John the Baptist on a dish and no fewer than five self-portraits in the southern counties of England alone, each showing a quite different dark-eyed gentleman. In this thicket of dreams, copies and outright delusions, how was one supposed to discover a true Velázquez? People resorted to Palomino’s biography. If Palomino said Velázquez painted fish, or fruit, or still lifes of vegetables, then such paintings would be found. If Palomino said Velázquez painted the Count-Duke Olivares more than once, then ten or twenty counts would turn up.

  In the mists before the evolution of the modern art world, even such an authority as Stirling Maxwell can make some extraordinary claims. In his judgment, a painting by Velázquez’s son-in-law, Mazo, showing the family quarters in the east wing of the Alcázar, which is now more valued for its documentary evidence of the contemporary life of the painter than for its erratic brushwork and inconsistent perspective, is a genuine Velázquez. And not just genuine, but quite possibly the best picture he ever painted: “The composition has never been surpassed and perhaps it excels even the Meninas” (this from one of the few British writers who had actually seen this painting in the Prado). This is because Velázquez, or rather Mazo, has cleared out the unsightly staff. “The dwarfs of the palace have not intruded in the privacy of the painter’s home.”

  But the greatest anomaly in the whole book is the one that most shocks. Stirling Maxwell writes that Velázquez left a “curious study of one of the women dwarfs, in the nude state, and in the character of Silenus . . . Captain Widdrington says he saw it.” Such was the state of knowledge in those days that a man who had traveled as widely in Spain as Stirling Maxwell was still forced back upon the partial glimpses of earlier travelers, unreliable memories and hearsay.

  The female dwarf, nude and in the character of the Greek god of drunkenness, is such an offense against Velázquez, most dignified of all painters, that one wonders if Stirling Maxwell has actually looked at the paintings of dwarves in the Prado—whether he is even writing about the same painter at all. And yet he was a figure of such authority and experience, compared to the lowly bookseller who had never left England and whose portrait of Prince Charles he now so abruptly denied. It is all the more remarkable that John Snare would one day muster the courage to publish a counterblast.

  7

  A Man in Full

  YOU HAVE TO look up to this little man on his rock; the picture raises him up. He is out in the open, high among the Spanish hills and far away from the gloomy prison of court, living in the sunshine of Velázquez’s paint.

  Francisco Lezcano is said to be his name, and he was hired to work as a playmate for Baltasar Carlos when the prince was four or five years old. At some stage in their years together, the dwarf and the little boy must have been the same height.

  Lezcano was well liked for his gentle ways and is identified with this young man in green precisely because of the dreaminess conveyed in the portrait. The soft hair, the breathing mouth, the face tipping back to get a better look at the painter: the warmth of body and soul, and of mutual empathy, radiate from the canvas. The dwarf’s face is attentive and so is Velázquez’s brushwork. It is a portrait full of grace (Plate D).

  In his little hands, like an attribute, Lezcano holds a tiny book or perhaps a pack of playing cards. These were seen as a symbol of idleness, but Lezcano is not idle so much as relaxed, settling back on this rock in the balmy outdoors. It ought to be a perilous position for such a small person, but he takes it in his stride, one leg casually slung over the rock, the other extended towards the viewer. He is free. This is his day off, a day away from the duties of companion and court entertainer. His face is bright against the forest green of his clothes and the mountain surroundings, so that the whole painting seems to focus on his sunlit half-smile. But the eyes are delicately veiled, one beneath its lid and the other in shadow. They are soft and still and what they register is seeing—seeing Velázquez, just as Velázquez looks calmly back at his companion. His way of painting, so fluent and gentle, gives Lezcano the utmost respect.

  Yet this is not how some art historians have viewed the portrait at all. Instead, they have found vacancy in those eyes, declaring that Lezcano is evidently deformed in mind as well as body. The dwarf has been described as half-witted, weak-brained and, even in the twentieth century, as an abortion of Nature. His head is too big, his legs are too short, his eyes unfocused and his mouth half-open: obviously he must be retarded.

  This has been the prevailing bias ever since the portrait first appeared before the public at the Prado in 1819 (where it was catalogued as “A dim-witted girl”) and yet everything goes against it, not least the facts. The length of Lezcano’s arms and legs, the prominence of his nose and forehead are all features of achondroplasia, otherwise known as short-limb dwarfism. There is no evidence, and there never has been, that this condition affects intelligence in any way. And the same writers who see Lezcano as slow—or dangerously quick, in the eyes of one writer, who was able to imagine something homicidal in his face—would have to concede that the short-limbed dwarves of the Spanish court were famously employed for their wit, and not the lack of it.

  Velázquez is remarkably accurate about Lezcano’s achondroplasia; but the portrait is in no way prurient. It does not pretend to know his predicament so much as empathize with his experience as a man who has to live on his wits to survive. His clothes are theatrical: the big hat,
the oversized cloak that must have dragged in after him when he entered a room; and perhaps he performed startling tricks with his cards. But Lezcano’s expression has nothing to do with his guise, or his size, and whatever role he played in palace life, whether he was perceived as wondrous or comic, he is not playing it now with his eyes.

  It is this watchful stillness—an almost conspiratorial exchange of understanding between them—that distinguishes the dwarves in Velázquez’s paintings. These men and women had to be prodigiously talented to thrive at the court, they had to understand how to use their looks to hold and not repel people’s attention. They had to learn how to turn the joke back on the joker, so that anyone who mocked them could be mocked in return, anyone who pitied them could be defied. There are many stories of dwarves at European courts who were allowed to say what others could not, by virtue of their size, and who enjoyed extraordinary freedoms of speech. They might sit on the floor at mealtimes keeping up a flow of caustic observations, or climb into the laps of courtiers and tease them to their faces; indeed, these same courtiers sometimes paid these same dwarves to say to their royal masters what they could not.

  But the dwarves at the court of Philip IV were not necessarily there just to make people laugh, no matter that they might have the skills of a clown. Certainly they were hired for their appearance—little people contrasting with their noble overlords, low and high, quirks of Nature compared to Nature’s supposed prodigies—but also for their special gifts. Historians traditionally lump them into the general category of court entertainers—dwarves, jesters, actors, sometimes grouped as buffoons—but there is a world of difference between them, and between their professions, and Velázquez singles them out.

  That is his way of thinking about all human beings; everyone is unique. Singularity is all. And perhaps Velázquez sees this more than anywhere else among his colleagues, the dwarves.