The Vanishing Velázquez

by Laura Cumming

  At the beginning of the third week, James West was at his post in the hotel foyer ready to greet visitors. West was a cabinetmaker who happened to be lodging in Old Bond Street when the picture was on display there. He came to know Snare well and remained loyal to him through every crisis. But the most valuable service West ever performed for his friend was the calm and sober account he would later give under oath, at the Court of Session in Edinburgh, of what happened next at Tait’s Hotel.

  It was a little after lunch on January 31. West was taking the ticket money (a shilling) and Snare was upstairs, hovering as always by his masterpiece. A number of visitors were admiring the picture when a pair of sheriff officers burst into the salon with a warrant to remove it there and then, by force if necessary. Somehow Snare kept cool enough to study this document, issued by the local sheriff’s court. It stated that the Velázquez currently in his possession had been stolen “at some time unknown” from the Trustees of the 2nd Earl Fife. It must be confiscated straight away because this Englishman, being a foreigner, and a tradesman to boot, “might be very apt to run away with it.” Despite the bewilderment, and the affront, Snare remained composed, quietly sending West out to find a lawyer and entering into negotiations with these sheriff officers for the next two hours. He told them about the auction at Radley Hall, about the show in London, about the pamphlets and all the press coverage, explaining that there must be some kind of mistake. He even suggested that if they would only keep the Velázquez safe themselves, at Tait’s Hotel, he would go straight to the court in person and clear up any confusion about his ownership. But the sheriff officers were out to get their “stolen” goods and as twilight fell, the picture was taken down, removed from its frame (to Snare’s wincing horror) and lugged on its stretcher through the dark and freezing streets up the Mound, across the Royal Mile that sloped down from the castle and down again to the courthouse in the Lawnmarket.

  Snare and West struggled to keep up. When they eventually reached the Lawnmarket they found the officer in charge so uneasy about the legitimacy of the warrant that he had already suggested sending the picture straight back to Tait’s Hotel. But two agents representing the Trustees—the mysterious Messrs. Burns and Inglis—were sent to intimidate him. Reluctantly the officer had the painting boxed and sealed with his personal signet, on account of what he felt to be “the dreadful responsibility of handling such a valuable work.” The portrait was taken down to the cellars beneath the court and there it stayed—seized, detained, kidnapped, as the press had it—through all the furor that followed.

  Snare was devastated. He immediately lodged an appeal, imagining that light would dawn and all would be well. It was rejected—his first experience of the baffling dramas to come. He tried everything he could, filing one application after another right up through the legal system, thwarted every time by counterpetitions from the powerful Trustees. This group numbered several scions of the Fife family, including the 4th and present earl, as well as William Souter, Writer to Her Majesty’s Signet, a very senior lawyer in his own right.

  The English tradesman now found himself on the wrong side of the Scottish establishment.

  Snare certainly knew who these Trustees were, for he had dispatched West to call upon William Souter in his Edinburgh chambers only days before, hoping that he might have more information about the picture’s history. Out of courtesy—or naivety—Snare had even sent along a free ticket for the show. He received a dusty answer. It is certainly no coincidence that the sheriff officers descended two days later.

  The warrant they served is a slippery document. It does not state that Snare has stolen the picture himself, only that he is in possession of stolen goods, with the dark implication that he knows this full well. As for the theft, it alleges that the picture was stolen from the 2nd Earl’s possessions some time after his death in 1809, which could have been practically any time in the previous forty years. To sharpen up this risibly vague scenario, the Trustees further claim that the picture must have been “effectually hidden” ever since.

  Somebody had stolen it, somebody had hidden it, yet apparently not a soul had noticed when it disappeared and nobody ever raised the alarm. But now that it had turned up once more, the Trustees were having it back.

  Two weeks after the picture was seized, a judge finally ruled in Snare’s favor, noting that the picture had been honestly acquired. He did not conceal his disdain for the Trustees’ case:

  The petitioners admit that Mr Snare, the respondent, publicly exhibited the picture about a year ago in London. But nothing is done until the foreign purchaser crosses the River Tweed. In Scotland, the petitioners, without any premonition whatever, attempt to deprive the respondent of his property, on the bare averment that it is stolen. And when stolen? The date of the theft is unknown—the locus of the theft is not stated—the manner of the theft is not stated—the thief is not even hinted at. The petitioners are at a loss when they describe the disappearance. The picture was “stolen or surreptitiously abstracted.” If the latter expression means something different from theft, it is an alternative statement by the petitioners. But nothing but theft could support such a proceeding as that adopted by the petitioners whose treatment of the bona fide purchaser of the picture has been outrageous.

  Succinct and conclusive: case closed, one might think. But still the picture remained beneath the ground in the Lawnmarket while the Trustees put in five more appeals, all laborious and expensive and all rejected as vexatious. Two months passed before Snare finally got his picture back.

  • • •

  What to do next? He printed another handbill—“Seizure and Restoration”—to make the best of the story, and opened the show in Princes Street once more, complete with accompanying pamphlets. But the picture now had the taint of crime upon it and the citizens of Edinburgh in all their probity stayed away. The dwindling ticket sales could not begin to compensate for the losses he had already suffered, still less the legal fees or the mounting hotel bills. John Snare was running out of money.

  He had been sinking into financial difficulty ever since the Old Bond Street freeholders forced him to part with £400. From 1845, when he bought the painting, to 1849 when the Trustees seized it, Snare had devoted himself to the Velázquez—to showing it, writing about it, obsessing over its history and authenticity, defending it against every kind of attack—all to the neglect of the Minster Street business. During his long absences, his wife, Isabella, had to deal with suppliers and creditors pressing for money. Bills apparently went unpaid. A more agonizing worry came in 1848 with a lawsuit closer to home, when Snare was sued for failing in his duties as executor to two separate wills, including that of his uncle Robert. Snare’s own sister pursued him for money owed. In all this chaos, with the business floundering and three children under the age of ten to support, perhaps all he could think of—perhaps all he ever wanted to think of—was the painting; it might be his salvation, if he took it on tour.

  Perhaps Snare had this in mind when he bid for another painting in 1848. The British press was reeling with the news that the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos had so overspent his stupendous fortune—said to be the largest in the world—that the bailiffs were coming after his assets. These included Stowe House, set in a landscaped park of temples and follies and filled with magnificent paintings.

  The auction of the duke’s collection took place in August and was enthusiastically reported throughout Europe. The Morning Post ran four pages on the sale and there, among the details, is the purchase of “one of the premiere paintings,” The Confinement of John Duke of Cleves by Rembrandt, “bought for 81 guineas by Mr Snare of Reading, the owner of the Velázquez.”

  This painting is powerfully dramatic (though its subject is now recognized as Samson threatening his father-in-law). Samson appears behind bars in the feathered hat and velvet robes that Rembrandt himself wears in an early self-portrait. Snare sold it quite rapidly—the painting was much later bought by the Chrysler Museum i
n Virginia—perhaps to fund the Edinburgh exhibition; the money certainly didn’t go to his creditors.

  By the spring of 1849 Snare had a different reputation in the press. Newspapers all over Britain had covered the incident at Tait’s Hotel—Seizure and Theft! Earl’s Masterpiece Recovered! Stolen Velázquez in Scotland! But the local coverage was the most damaging for Snare. Even the Reading Mercury was aghast; the newspaper that had once been so proud of its local bookseller went from concern to confusion to outright doubt. Custom at Minster Street began to slow amid the shameful rumors, until one day it ceased altogether. Receivers prepared for the collapse of the business, which happened with drastic speed. By June, John Snare was bankrupt.

  The kindly foreman of the print works, William Webb, would one day be questioned at court in Edinburgh about the decline:

  Q. Did people in Reading hear of the seizure in Edinburgh?

  A. Oh yes, the news of the theft became the subject of conversation all over the town. It had a material effect on the business. The people said that Mr Snare was a ruined man.

  Q. Did the men in Mr Snare’s employment ever say anything about their wages?

  A. They said they were almost ashamed to ask for their wages, there was so little business doing; they had a feeling of pity for Mr Snare. We came to have no work in the printing office—that was my department; the business dropped off by degrees and in the course of one month we had nothing to do. We were there till the auctioneer commenced taking the inventory—about six months after the intelligence reached Reading.

  Q. Did it appear to you to be a great sale, or an ordinary sale?

  A. It was a great sale, and a great sacrifice.

  The sale of Snare’s worldly goods began in August and continued, lot by lot, exhaustively described in an immense catalogue available at the price of one shilling—perhaps the only publication in his entire story not printed by Snare—for twelve full days.

  It began with the beautiful stationery: several thousand blue-laid envelopes and quires of rose-tinted paper, quarts of scarlet ink, black ink by the gallon, wedding envelopes and sermon covers, silk purses and gold paper, sealing wax, quill pens and string.

  There were drawing pencils, watercolor boxes and French pastels. There were violin strings and penny whistles, and those eccentric bundles—shuttlecocks and funnels, apple scoops and spoons—where the items have family relationships. At Minster Street you could buy children’s necklaces and wax effigies of monarchs. The stock had its own exuberant largesse.

  The books went on for days: Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontës, George Eliot; Chaucer and Shakespeare, Diderot and Goethe; philosophy from Aristotle to David Hume; all the great historians, Herodotus, Gibbon, Macaulay; atlases of the wide world and colored maps of the local countryside. Three copies of Miss Mitford’s bestselling memoir, Our Village, and Snare’s own Berkshire guide with its picturesque engravings. There were several books on Spanish painting.

  The twelfth and final day was the sale of “sundry works of art.” The first items were touchingly modest: local landscapes, fruit, a girl in a bonnet. But what came next was the mirror in which one glimpses the bookseller. Snare had Jacques Callot’s The Miseries and Sufferings of War, a terrifyingly brilliant set of etchings that inspired Goya, as well as Goya’s own dark prints of mankind’s follies and sorrows. He had Rembrandt’s complete etchings in folio. He had several Stuart portraits, including one by Cornelius Jansen from the reign of Charles I.

  But as the lots came up for sale, one by one, there was no sign of the Velázquez.

  By the end of the day, the auctioneers were selling off the blinds, the counters and even the bookshelves. The final item was the polished brass doorknob. The premises themselves were now sold and Snare’s name was erased from the fanlight above the door. But a faint echo can still be seen in a drawing made a few years later for Swain the Ropemaker, the business that followed: Swain’s W has not quite vanquished Snare’s N.

  It all went to ruin in such a short time. Once Snare was the toast of Reading, the talk of London, the brave provincial tradesman who had discovered the lost Velázquez, saluted in the press. He had welcomed the Duke of Wellington and conferred with the Count of Montemolin. He had awed Edinburgh with his chaste and mysterious Velázquez and might have continued to amaze the great cities of Britain, but now it was all over. He had gone from buying the treasures of a ruined duke to seeing his own possessions auctioned; from the pinnacle of respectability to mistrust and disgrace. He had lost a business built up by two generations of Snares; he had lost his good name.

  And how did the Snares feel about the intense humiliation in that little street at the very heart of Reading, right there among the town’s shops and offices, doctors and clerics, only yards from the bank where her family were shareholders, beside the church where they worshipped, opposite his brother’s thriving business; right there on the very premises where they lived, coming in and out of that door that lost its knob, in front of the entire town and the knackers themselves, the auctioneers from Haslam’s just around the corner bringing down the gavel on a barrel with the sale of every lot?

  If Isabella Snare had any courage left, she must have needed it now. For there is no sign that Snare was there, present at the devastation she endured. She had already had to live with so much anxiety, from the buildup to the Radley Hall sale and the Old Bond Street exhibition to the seizure in Edinburgh, her husband writing furiously day and night and so often away, her shop crowded with gawping visitors, her house filled with obsessive conversation and then suddenly silent, shunned. And now, in full view of every single person she knew—all her husband’s relations, and all of her own—she had to watch their belongings passing out of the building one by one, along with every iota of the family reputation.

  Cruelest of all, as she watched her home being sold, Isabella Snare was heavily pregnant. Her fourth and last child was born a few days after the auction in September 1849. No name is given in the parish records. The child is anonymous, recorded without ceremony as another male infant.

  There is no written evidence of Isabella’s reactions to her husband’s downfall, but it was the end of her own life in Minster Street. She lost her home and her livelihood and was forced to move with her children into the house of her father. There is no proof that Snare went with them. Perhaps she lost her husband, too. His whereabouts in the next two years—and those of the painting—now become peculiarly uncertain.

  Snare, once a most prominent son of Reading, supplier of its pencils, books and paper, printer of its maps and postal directories, who once knew everyone, through whose shop the citizens had passed for conversation and more for decades, and who had brought renown to the town, was becoming a ghost.

  • • •

  All that can be said for certain is that he did not submit to the Edinburgh injustice. In the autumn of 1849 John Snare’s lawyer lodged a claim for damages against the Trustees and there began a case so convoluted that the Scottish press had some difficulty following its serpentine twists. Each time Snare’s side succeeded in arguing for a proper hearing before a senior judge, the Trustees would appeal the ruling, bringing to bear every maneuver in the book so that the technicalities ramified over more than a year to the point where one of the presiding sheriffs described the variety and mass of the proceedings as unparalleled in his experience.

  More than once over the coming months the Trustees tried to make out that Snare was an English fly-by-night who might flit across the Tweed before the case was decided, dodging any legal costs for which he could be liable, and this had been their exact line when serving the warrant to stop him running off with “their” Velázquez in the first place. It is because of this accusation that one can momentarily pinpoint his whereabouts, in court testimony, when “the claimant” (Snare) promises to reside at a temporary address of 41 Lothian Street, Edinburgh, through the month of May 1850. But there is no hint that he remained in Scotland after that, and no evidence that he was in
England with his family (he was not living with them in the 1851 census). Strangest of all, for a man so eager to speak on behalf of his painting, there is no sense that Snare was present in Edinburgh when he finally won the right to a full-scale trial.

  11

  The Trial

  THE TRIAL THAT unfolded in Edinburgh in the summer of 1851 had only one issue at stake: whether there should be reparation for the damages caused by the picture’s seizure. It might almost have been a matter of haggling over money. But by an unexpected turn of events it became something else: a battle between an English tradesman and the Scottish aristocracy, riven with prejudice, mockery, racism and class bias, and characterized by wild discrepancies of experience and judgment. The argument about how much John Snare had suffered was rapidly swept aside, moreover, by much larger questions: whether the picture showed Charles I as Prince of Wales, whether it belonged to the 2nd Earl Fife and above all—Stirling Maxwell’s challenge—whether it really was by Velázquez.

  The portrait itself was on trial.

  • • •

  The case was heard before Lord Cowan at the Court of Session, Scotland’s supreme civil court. With true Scottish rigor, the court sat until 10:30 each night and all through Saturday. The jury comprised five farmers, two bootmakers, a coal merchant, a grocer and a blacksmith, a baker from the seaside town of Musselburgh and a saddler from Dalkeith, which was no small ride, especially in an uncharacteristically hot Lothian summer.