• • •
Anyone trying to discover the history of the portrait today might begin, as Snare could not, with the computer. But it is striking just how swiftly the trail goes cold. There is scarcely any trace of its adventures, ominously, between Pacheco and Palomino and the negligible references to the bookseller himself. I soon found myself back in the very libraries Snare haunted, searching through the same books and marveling at how much he had managed to discover, nose deep in the past, without an index. For there are occasional sightings, here and there, though Snare could not find them all.
The first comes in the vivid book on London published in 1790 by Thomas Pennant, the Welsh naturalist and antiquarian. Pennant walked all the way from Wales to London to marvel at the sights of the city, the great river, the noble architecture, the wonders of London life. He gives a close account of every grand building on Whitehall, including the Banqueting House where Charles I was executed in 1649. At number 3 he admires the 2nd Earl Fife’s handsome Georgian house with its red-brick façade, high windows and elegant ceilings designed by Robert Adam. The earl shows him around his picture collection, with its noted portraits of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Duke of Buckingham, its lush canvases by Gainsborough and Van Dyck. And it is here, on the wall of the large drawing room, that Pennant is introduced to the cherished portrait of Charles I when Prince of Wales, “painted by the Spaniard Velasco.”
James Duff, 2nd Earl Fife, was an intellectual, a friend of Samuel Johnson and the Scottish philosopher David Hume, an ardent art collector and politician. Born in 1729, he represented Banffshire in the northeast of Scotland in the House of Commons for many decades and was an unusually dutiful MP at a time when many parliamentarians scarcely troubled to take their seat in the House. A progressive figure in Scottish agriculture, he built model farms on his estates, reduced the rents when times were hard, and bought grain from France to distribute as seed corn when the crops failed, at considerable personal expense. He seems to have been the opposite of the Duke of Sutherland (owner of the Velázquez that turned out to be a Rembrandt), whose role in driving local people from the land during the Highland Clearances remains notorious. The correspondence between the 2nd Earl and his estate factor is a touching portrait of the developing friendship between the two Scotsmen over decades, James to Willie, on every kind of subject from the new prime minister to the unusually early snowdrops in Banff.
After the earl’s death in 1809, most of the paintings in Whitehall would end up in his country seat, Duff House in Banffshire.
A few years after Pennant’s visit the 2nd Earl received a letter from another antiquarian, the Scottish cartographer, historian and numismatist John Pinkerton. Pinkerton has heard tell of the painting and writes to the earl in 1797 to ask if it is really true that he owns it. “Your letter,” comes the reply from Duff House on December 1, 1797, “was sent to me from London. I have a very large collection of portraits. And there is indeed a very curious portrait of Charles I, when Prince of Wales, painted by Valasky, at Madrid: it is in my house at Whitehall. You may see it when you please. I am making out a catalogue of my pictures. If you remind me, I shall certainly send you a copy. I shall be in town by Christmas.”
A copy of this catalogue survives in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, its heavy pages mottled with mildew. Affectionately inscribed to a lady who has done him the honor of examining his pictures, it is a testament to that vanished time when earls took a personal pride in their art. Fife welcomed visitors to Whitehall with something close to gratitude, delightedly escorting them around the portraits. Even when he was in his seventies, stooped and blind, he still managed to accomplish this guided tour entirely by touch and devoted memory.
The earl had scarcely any pictures to start with, inheriting few from his parents other than their own portraits. But in the 1798 catalogue he writes, “I have lately had the good fortune to purchase many curious Portraits and Pictures smuggled over from France, since the beginning of the Revolution there. The Royal portraits were bought from many different places; many of them are very rare, and in great preservation.”
The catalogue walks the reader through the collection, room by room. He has Van Dyck’s great portrait of Sir Kenelm Digby, diplomat and member of the Spanish Match entourage, whose letters home describe some of the diciest moments. There are paintings by Holbein and Poussin, a spirited portrait of the actor David Garrick as Hamlet, Godfrey Kneller’s Alexander Pope and numerous Tudors and Stuarts. And in the First Drawing Room is the portrait of Charles “When Prince of Wales, 3 quarters. Painted at Madrid 1625 when his marriage with the infanta was proposed. This picture belonged to Buckingham.”
When he comes upon his own copy of the catalogue, Snare, ever the respectful reader, is polite about that mistaken date. The printer diagnoses a misprint.
But there are worse errors to come. In 1851, the historian Mackenzie Walcott refers to the Velázquez in his Memorials of Westminster as a “celebrated head of Charles I when Prince of Wales, supposed to be the work of Velasco.” By 1902, a later writer has converted this “head” to marble: “this statue was executed in Spain when his Royal Highness was there in 1625.” The confusions creep in down the years: 1625, by Valasky or Velasco, who has now become a sculptor.
John Snare had only two sources—Pennant and the 2nd Earl’s catalogue—but was faced with a more teasing discrepancy than spellings. Pennant referred to the portrait as a head, while the 2nd Earl specified three-quarters: which was it?
A three-quarter portrait, though it seems to imply a three-quarter-length figure, is in fact a term in general use since the 1630s to refer to the size of a canvas, usually 29 or 30 inches by 24 or 25. (Three-quarters, historically, refers to three-quarters of a yard.) There are many instances of three-quarter portraits from the seventeenth century onwards; they tend to show a figure to the waist or just below. But a three-quarter portrait could also depict just the head and shoulders.
Although it is a stretch, the two different descriptions of the Velázquez could almost be made to agree, if this was a head-and-shoulders portrait painted on a three-quarters canvas. Snare has to square the descriptions because “both are obviously referring to the same Picture, there being no other to which the after-description about Madrid in the collection would apply.” In this he is surely correct. But then, a few pages later, he notices that Pennant describes another painting as “A Head of Charles the First” and decides that he has simply muddled the portraits in his account.
Now there is another nerve-racking complication. In his catalogue, the 2nd Earl says that the picture once belonged to the Duke of Buckingham. What if he is speaking of a more recent Buckingham? Snare cannot believe this. He rightly points out that the 2nd Earl’s catalogue contains a large number of portraits of members of the Buckingham family painted in the 1620s, and though it is entirely possible that they may have been bought as a job lot from the present duke (of which there is no evidence to this day), only one of them is singled out, only one of them is glossed with that special boast: “belonged to Buckingham,” meaning the famous (or infamous) George Villiers, 1st Duke.
Snare admits that he cannot prove the picture belonged to Villiers, and he cannot show how it got into the hands of the 2nd Earl Fife. He cannot absolutely, and securely, prove that Pennant and Fife are talking about the same painting. He concedes all these points in The History and Pedigree, and frets sorrowfully—and honestly—over the holes in his narrative.
But given all the documents available today, Snare’s theories still remain plausible: that Charles no longer wants the painting and gives it to Buckingham, avid art collector, just as he gave him the enormous Giambologna statue; that the portrait probably vanished from York House after Buckingham’s murder (when Velázquez’s name still meant nothing in England) or after his successor’s flight from the Civil War in 1642, or as the Civil War was drawing to a close four years later. Whereupon debt or embezzlement, mishap or war sees it either slip through th
e slats or vanish abroad. There are documents of four different sales relating to the Buckingham collection in a period of sixty years and many paintings disappeared into Europe in this time, where they might quite possibly have been bought by the 2nd Earl Fife from their present owners: “smuggled over from France, since the beginning of the Revolution.” Thus the portrait disappears in the seventeenth century and reappears in the late eighteenth in Fife House—assuming that this is the same picture owned by the 2nd Earl. Snare realizes his theory pivots upon this point and that he needs more proof than Fife’s catalogue. That proof arrives quite without warning.
• • •
While the painting was on show in Minster Street in 1847, a servant working at nearby Mapledurham Manor asked to come and see it for personal reasons. Snare agreed, avid to know more in case it shed any light on the picture’s history. Once again he stood anxiously by as a stranger scrutinized his Velázquez; once again he was not disappointed. There was no talk of Van Dyck—quite the reverse. The servant wanted to see the portrait for sentimental reasons; his father had talked of the Velázquez from his time serving the 2nd Earl at Fife House. Could he remember how the earl came by the picture? The servant offered to write to his father, long since retired to Scotland, asking for any memories, however small.
Weeks of silence turned to nail-biting months before a response eventually arrived:
Dear Son, I have been too long in writing to you, but was always waiting to make more inquiries concerning that Picture. Mr Forteath the factor recollects it being at Fife House, but how it came there he cannot say. John Brown and his wife were two or three years working there, they both know the picture, but cannot say when nor from whom it was purchased . . . So there can be no evidence got here, and I am afraid there is none living at this day that can give any more. Your affectionate Father, Alex. Grant.
Grant regrets he can give no more information: how amazed he would have been to know how much joy his letter brought Snare. “Independent of the writer,” he enthuses, “four individuals are mentioned as recognising the Portrait to have been in Fife House. Five persons therefore speak positively to one fact . . . The Portrait is clearly recognised as having once belonged to the Earl Fife, and as having formerly adorned Fife House.”
Now it should be acknowledged that not one of these four individuals had seen the portrait in Minster Street; and the fifth, the Mapledurham servant, had never seen the portrait in Fife House. They are all going by written descriptions, and it is one of the oddest aspects of those days that these could possibly be thought to suffice. An envoy writes from Venice that he has a landscape with three horses and a half-built haystack by a Florentine painter, and that is supposed to be enough for the distant buyer to part with his money, never mind that it might be anything from a forgery to a daub, that the painter may be Dutch, that the haystack may be something quite else, that there is no way of knowing what the picture really looks like.
Inventories run to little more than a line per painting, in those times. Auction catalogues scarcely manage anything more. Early historians frequently concern themselves only with the subject of a painting—not how it appeared, how it was painted, how it struck the viewer—even though every work of art is so much more than its content.
The servants who had dusted the portrait of Prince Charles in Whitehall, who knew its surface by the inch, might not have believed that it was the same picture as the one in Reading, had they only seen it themselves.
The strength of Snare’s developing case comes from the fact that each piece of evidence is corroborated by another; they all become mutually reinforcing. That his picture once belonged to the 2nd Earl is supported by these people’s testimony, but also by the notion that he eventually parted with it, the proof of which must come from finding the various dealers through whose hands it may have passed on its way to Radley Hall.
The last piece of the puzzle arrives quite suddenly by post, on July 28, 1847, in a letter received from a London restorer named Thomas Mesnard, to whom Snare had turned for help. Mesnard (who greatly admires it) announces that he has two colleagues who not only know of the picture, but have actually seen it with their own eyes, hanging in the premises of one dealer who did business with Earl Fife, and another dealer who is said to have sold it to Mr. Kent at Radley Hall. Five Scottish servants, three London dealers, a peer of the realm and a Spanish monarch: for Snare, the circle is complete. This is the lost portrait.
But is it?
• • •
Snare published The History and Pedigree in August 1847, in response to the wounding hostility of the Fine Arts Journal. He must have written it in less than three months; indeed, he stopped the Minster Street presses at the last minute, he confides, to include the contents of Mesnard’s letter. He opens with many apologies for being only a humble printer, liable to make many literary errors, but his writing is lucid, impassioned and eloquent, so much so that one almost comes to suspect his self-deprecating tone. Is he trying to wheedle the reader with false humility; conversely, is this an attempt to ingratiate himself with the public on the basis of class? One is always waiting for the clock to strike thirteen; it never does.
Newspapers throughout Britain thrilled to the pamphlet. “The manner in which Mr Snare has, without leaving the shadow of a doubt, traced the pedigree of the picture is truly wonderful,” wrote the Post, “as romantic in many of its incidents as the expedition of the princely original himself.” The publication “has converted many unbelievers among the best judges,” and so it seems. “The proofs are irresistible.” “Can scarcely fail to convince the most sceptical reader.” “Mr Snare has settled the question!”
“That the picture is a work of high art is attested in the fact that it has been pretty generally attributed to Van Dyck,” writes the Times correspondent. “But this point has been most learnedly and we think satisfactorily put out of court by the criticisms of Snare.” Sure enough, Snare’s reasoning seems sound. Van Dyck came to England in 1620, very briefly, before Prince Charles had a beard, and did not work for him again until 1632, when King Charles looked different and much older. If the portrait was made in the 1620s in England, and not Spain, it would have to have been by one of the court painters, such as Cornelius Jonson or Daniel Mytens, who worked there through that decade. But since none of these artists had ever seen a picture by the unknown Velázquez, they could hardly have painted anything that so resembled the Spaniard’s unique style. (Unless of course they had in fact seen, and tried to emulate or even copy, Velázquez’s portrait of Prince Charles; this is a step Snare does not take since he believes that the portrait is genuine.)
One acute reviewer observes that Snare’s passion for the portrait “is as angling to Mr Isaac Walton, almost the only thing in this sublunary world worth caring for.” But Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper makes an even greater literary comparison. In its palpable sincerity, in its honest inquiry and truth of expression, The History “ranks with the pamphlets of Daniel Defoe.”
Snare might at last have reached some peace of mind about his painting. How much more he could believe in it, after the universal endorsement of the pedigree he had set forth; how much more he could hope that others hereafter would see it as he did. He had been unfairly accused of speculation, of trying to hype the picture for sale when he hadn’t the slightest desire to part with it; he had been accused of ignorance and, if not ignorance, then wilful “knavery” in trying to forward a hoax. Now he could at least rest in the knowledge that he had done his best to provide a convincing history for this masterpiece. But then Sir William Stirling Maxwell came at him—and not once, but in two books.
In his Annals of the Artists of Spain Stirling Maxwell was not quite unkind: “Mr Snare has shown great industry in collecting, and skill in arranging the presumptive evidence as to this point [authenticity], which I do not think, however, that he has proved.” The author does not believe Snare has shown that the painting definitely belonged to the 2nd Earl Fife; and, even if h
e had, that would establish nothing more than the earl’s opinions about the painting. But much more significant is this second objection: “I cannot agree with him in considering that this picture, more than three parts finished, can be the work spoken of by Pacheco as a ‘bosquexo’ or sketch.” It is too complete.
Stirling Maxwell was one of those who interpreted Pacheco’s vexed sentence to mean that Charles was on a hunting trip at the time, so Velázquez can only have made a very hasty sketch en route. But he does acknowledge the printer’s contribution to knowledge. “Mr Snare’s book, however, is no less candid than curious, and deserves a place amongst works on Spanish art if only for its translation of Pacheco.”
Damned by a phrase, the picture is too complete to be a sketch. Yet Velázquez’s haunting images of the Medici Gardens in Rome have long been known as sketches because they were made on the spot, and they are more than “three parts complete.” Las Meninas was once described as the largest oil sketch in the world. Who, beyond the artist himself, is ever to say when, or if, a work is finished in any case; in Velázquez’s portraits, faces magically condense out of loose strokes and emptiness as nebulous as air, while bodies are barely touched in, yet these works were accepted in his lifetime as fit for the walls of the palace.
Even before Stirling Maxwell, Richard Ford wonders at Velázquez’s miraculous way of working on the canvas as if making a sketch: “He seems to have drawn straight on the canvas, for any sketches or previous studies on paper are never to be met with.”
The Vanishing Velázquez Page 10