The Vanishing Velázquez

by Laura Cumming

  But in 2003 a portrait of a man emerged from a private collection into the Prado Museum. He was nameless, but it seemed that he might qualify for the role of the barber who looked after Innocent’s health and appearance. He was depicted on a piece of canvas cut from the same cloth used for the Pope; how fitting that he might have cut the Pope’s locks.

  With his wavy hair, girlish eyelashes and breezy mustache, this man looks as if he might well be a barber. The image isn’t formal—there is no distance between sitter and painter—and yet there is something strange going on. This man is not responding to Velázquez; there is no engagement in his eyes. He is sly. You go closer in the Prado, as so often, to see how this mystery is achieved and it all comes down to a mark about the size of this little letter i.

  The ambiguity of the face depends upon one faint grey scintilla on the left eyelid, so subtle and small it scarcely seems possible that the whole portrait is inflected by it. But something in that mark suggests recoil; Velázquez doesn’t trust his sitter.

  In the 1920s August Mayer, the German art historian whose studies of Velázquez influenced scholarship for the better part of a century, saw this portrait in the gloom of Chilham Castle in Kent (its adventures between Italy and England are unknown). He was struck by the informality. No pomp, no props, a casual sitting: Mayer had the man pegged as another buffoon. But then the buffoon turned out to be Italian, not Spanish, because the beard and mustache were identified as Roman fashion; and then he became a barber, because his collar was too modest for the chamberlain or the majordomo; and then, in the twenty-first century, the barber turned into a banker.

  A scholar who had trawled the Roman state archives for decades hit upon the final identification. The banker Ferdinando Brandani kept careful accounts, in the manner of his profession, and among them was a receipt for a portrait of precisely these dimensions. The scholar then discovered that Brandani owned another picture of himself by a different artist; she found it: the two likenesses matched.

  The fact that Mayer thought the man was a buffoon and not a papal grandee confirms just how intimate the portrait appeared, how close it was (and is) to those profound images of colleagues, actors and dwarves. Many historians have concluded that the ten or so Roman portraits must show the influence of Italian painting, the fluent manner of Bernini, and of Titian before him. But it could as well come from the liberty of Velázquez’s life in the Eternal City, the intensity of the Italian experience, the close companionship he had with the people around him, with intellectuals and fellow painters. Rome was his freedom. We know that he fathered a baby called Antonio, born after his departure, because a record of payment to the baby’s nurse has come to light. Nobody knows who the mother was, or if the infant survived, though there is the romantic hope that she might have been the painter Flaminia Trionfi.

  Perhaps Trionfi kept the portrait to herself. There is no trace of it now, and no trace of her work, either. Unlike the paintings of little and large princesses with their rouged cheeks and obsolete clothes, held in place by the great barred cages of their under-dresses, never moving from the palace where they were made, Flaminia’s portrait was not tethered to a single place; lacking signature and identity, it could drift free, move among other houses. Many of the paintings Velázquez made in Rome remained there; but some came back with him to Madrid. View of the Gardens of the Villa Medici is one such, a souvenir of the world seen through his eyes, as it was when he was present on that summer’s day; a vision of the world as it looked before we were there.

  • • •

  One last Roman story. On that second visit Velázquez painted the great portrait of Juan de Pareja, a slave of Moorish descent who worked with him from the 1630s, grinding pigments, priming canvases and making studio copies. Perhaps Pareja prepared the very pigment used to make his own portrait, or painted one of the persuasive copies once mistaken for originals. For he was a gifted painter in his own right, judged as worthy of an entry in Palomino’s Lives and Works of the Most Eminent Spanish Artists as Velázquez himself.

  Pareja is poised, magnificent, proud (Plate I). He holds himself with all the dignity of a hero who has accomplished recent marvels on land or sea; not for nothing has he been cast as the face of Othello. A man of action keeping still for his portrait, he has one hand at the ready, as if resting on the hilt of a sword. But there is no sword and the hand is scarcely more substantial than the fabric around it, just a hint of fingers, almost notational, and the ear is nothing but an irregular red dab. Velázquez holds these outlying elements in abeyance, indistinct, because this is how they appear to our eyes in peripheral vision. The true focus is the face.

  That face is strong, beautiful and profoundly expressive. Some have seen vulnerability there, perhaps extrapolating from the notion of a slave required to sit for his portrait, a man without power striving to find it within himself when exposed to his master’s gaze; others have seen coolness, disdain or the hint of a militant temperament. The portrait holds so many nuances that one senses the human complexity of this man before all else; and this is enhanced by the frisson of recognizability. For no matter when he lived, this is a man one might see in the streets of New York today: he looks like one of us, as the people in the portraits around him in the Metropolitan Museum do not.

  This vitality, this veracity, was something noticed by the very first commentators when the picture was displayed outside, beneath the portico of the Pantheon, for an international artists’ festival on March 19, 1650. “It received such universal acclaim,” wrote a Flemish painter who saw it that day, “that in the opinion of all the painters of different nations everything else looked like painting, this alone like truth.” This is exactly Manet’s feeling in that letter sent to Fantin-Latour from Madrid. The other painters in the Prado are just making it up, he writes, they are nothing but fakers by comparison. Velázquez’s sitters are real, present, true. Take away the collar, and Juan is our contemporary.

  This collar is dazzling, a brilliant white expanse of fabric painted on fabric. The cloth of the picture becomes the cloth of the collar, as it seems, in both real and representational ways. Velázquez is able to construe the warp and weft of canvas as a distant brick wall or as the weave of expensive Flemish cloth. Again one wonders how could he know where to put these dabs of lead white and Venetian grey to conjure this luxurious item, a collar that was banned under Spanish laws as too sumptuous. Why is Pareja wearing one? Perhaps it is a political gesture. The slave is portrayed as Velázquez’s colleague—one might say friend—and since both men have temporarily escaped Madrid and its punitive dress codes, the collar becomes a sign of freedom twice over. But it is also part of the aesthetic manifesto.

  Velázquez paints the nap of grey velvet with a few gliding marks, and where the clothing wears thin, so does the paint. He doesn’t trouble to number the buttons, which simply tail off like elliptical dots (etc. . . .). He doesn’t define the cloak or even the mouth, “one of the great orifices in art,” in the American painter Chuck Close’s celebratory remark, “out of focus yet you still know just how soft the lips would be to kiss.” The collar is rich, creamy, all scumbles and swags, as heavily worked as the stitched lace itself, yet never doggedly representational; a sumptuous accessory given sumptuous treatment.

  The collar was made to amaze, and not simply as a luxury item. Anyone looking closely at it now, as at Pareja’s face or the rest of his clothes, will see an unreadable scramble of marks. That they resolve into the man in the collar is as astonishing now as it must have been then. Velázquez draws them to your attention, as it were; you are not meant to see through them, as if they were part of some transparent illusion of reality. The veracity arrives out of incomprehensible chaos: it is vital that his people should look like paintings.

  Velázquez sent Pareja around Rome with his portrait to dramatize the surprise. “He drew Pareja with such similitude and liveliness,” writes Palomino, “that the Romans stood a while looking sometimes on the picture and someti
mes on the original, with amazement and even a sort of terror.” This was not the usual response, but something closer to awe at the fact that a living man and an inanimate object could look so alike, even though one of them was so conspicuously conjured from paint.

  How staggering this experience must have been to those first viewers: a black servant at the door carrying his own portrait. And since continuity was everything, one can only assume that Pareja was not only wearing the collar, but manifested the regal bearing of the man in the picture. It is therefore too easy to say, as people have, that Pareja was ennobled by this portrait; he did not need to be raised.

  “You know his [Velázquez’s] phlegmatic nature,” Philip IV wrote to his Roman ambassador after many months. “See that he does not take advantage of it to protract his sojourn at that court.” But Velázquez was not to be rushed. The king wrote again, and again, in the hope of drawing him home. Two years after he had left Madrid, Velázquez sailed back by way of Barcelona. He painted more portraits in that one Roman holiday than he would in the whole of the next decade at court. He was never granted leave of absence again.

  Pareja received his freedom in Rome in the autumn of 1650. But he did not leave, choosing to work alongside Velázquez until his death ten years later. And he lives on in our eyes through Velázquez, who gives him the utmost esteem; they are bound together in this stupendous painting. Juan de Pareja, via Diego Velázquez, became the most expensive portrait in history when it left an English country castle in 1971 to embark on a new life in America.

  13

  Velázquez on Broadway

  There is something intensely romantic in the fact that while walking up Broadway in the midst of a busy noonday crowd—made up of Bulls and Bears, rattling omnibuses, express wagons, Fifth-avenue carriages, railroad ticket offices, big hotels, big coaches hurrying passengers to steam on water or land—in a few moments, and by passing through a rather slim and dusty hall, you may shut yourself out from the present. In this silent place . . . may be seen a magnificent painting, a portrait of Charles I painted by the great Velázquez. This is truly superb.

  ON A MARCH morning in 1860 The New York Times urged its readers to make their way through the noise and haste of Broadway to the grand public building at 659, where they would see a genuine masterpiece by the Spanish artist Velázquez in the hush of the Stuyvesant Institute. This portrait would introduce them to a dazzling artist whose reputation had reached America long before any of his paintings, and it would place a famous figure before them, too: a young man, bearded, dark-eyed, solitary, a prince destined to die beneath the axe—the future Charles I.

  The Times writer was amazed by what he saw: “The warmth and life of the flesh, the breathing in the nostrils, the wonderful depth of expression in the eyes could be given by none but a master.” For the price of a dime, he had come face-to-face with the fabled genius of Velázquez.

  It would be another thirty years and more before the steel and railroad barons of the Upper East Side began to vie for Velázquez’s deathless portraits of princesses in shimmering gowns, of dwarves and servants, boy princes and grave courtiers, all ruled over by a sad-eyed monarch in the silvery shadows of the Spanish palace. The Metropolitan Museum had yet to open, although the picture of Prince Charles would one day appear on its walls. The Frick Collection, with its magnificent portrait of Philip in scarlet silk, had not yet been imagined, for Henry Frick was still a boy. Jules Bache, who gave the Metropolitan Museum two paintings that would eventually turn out to be by Velázquez, was not even born. If the owner of the portrait at 659 was right, this could be the first American Velázquez.

  For a few cents more, the man from The Times might have bought a curious pamphlet quite unlike the usual hyperbolic handbills to these shows, telling how the portrait came to be painted in Madrid in 1623 and by what luck it came into the possession of a humble tradesman, as the owner described himself, two centuries later in England. Indeed, visitors to the public rooms at the Stuyvesant Institute might actually have set eyes on this solitary man, haunting the corridors in a tarnished black suit. For he spent every day there, solicitously tending the ancient relics of Dr. Abbott’s famous Egyptian Museum on the ground floor. Some visitors would recall his habit of talking about the picture to anyone who would listen.

  A modern journalist might have wondered how this man now came to be showing the Velázquez in New York, why he had left his own country behind, indeed why he had not already sold this masterpiece for enough money to buy himself at least a new suit. But a modern journalist would have known so much more than his predecessor ever could—how rare such a portrait might be, how precious; above all, what a Velázquez might actually look like.

  There were no explanations in the pamphlet, no hint that John Snare might have brought the Velázquez to America in haste or desperation. Nothing in it suggested how long the picture had been in New York, or that it had in fact already made several appearances on Broadway, proceeding sporadically up that great thoroughfare from one address to another over the years. It would emerge into the light for a month or two, perhaps as long as three, and then just as randomly vanish from view. The writer from The New York Times was by no means the first to undergo this epiphany.

  Precisely when Snare arrived in New York is a mystery. His name does not seem to be on any of the available passenger manifests of ships sailing out of Britain before 1860. Perhaps there are missing documents or clerical errors; perhaps Snare traveled under another name. For there were times in his life when he might not wish to have drawn attention to himself, or his picture, passing through a British port.

  Sailing out of England—or was it Scotland?—he left behind a wife, four children and the whole little society of friends and relatives in which he had lived for more than forty years, attending their weddings, mourning their deaths, employing their neighbors and children, listening to their news over the Minster Street counter, praising their town in his writings and raising its name by association with Velázquez. He had been a man of substance, a figure of fame; and then he disappeared.

  In Edinburgh, during the 1851 trial, he does not take the stand despite the dramatic opportunity to talk up his painting. Perhaps his lawyers advised against it. But there are no glimpses of him in the Scottish newspapers, either, as there had been when the painting was seized. He gives no interviews, sends no letters, prints nothing, responds in no way to the triumphant verdict. There is no background noise, as always with Snare, only a ringing silence. If the painting appears nowhere in public after the Edinburgh disaster in 1849, then neither, apparently, does its owner.

  So it is surprising to find a notice in the Caledonian Mercury as late as 1852 implying that Snare may have set sail from Britain that summer. Where was he in those intervening years?

  The Scottish newspaper was reporting the latest legal news of the Velázquez. It had been running regular reports ever since the trial ended in 1851, for that was by no means the end of the torment. George Young, Snare’s barrister, was prophetic when he diagnosed something between acute litigiousness and outright malice on the Trustees’ part; they appealed time and again, while pursuing nearly incomprehensible counterclaims of their own, until they had exhausted both sides and whittled the damages all the way down to £550. Dickens’s Bleak House, with its case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, was coming out in instalments in 1852. If ever John Snare missed a trick, it was in failing to draw the comparison in any future pamphlet.

  The damages, now reduced almost by half, came too late for him in any case. His business had collapsed, his worldly goods had long since been sold. As soon as the trial had ended, and the verdict in favor of Snare was announced in the press, his own brother-in-law took out a suit against him for £500. It hardly seems likely that he would have—could have—lingered in Edinburgh for another whole year after the trial. He must have left Scotland long before, with his painting.

  Everything was for sale at the 1849 auction—everything except the Velázquez. The one
possession that might have kept the family afloat was not there, not even mentioned in the hoopla surrounding the auction. Since every Reading citizen must have known of it—the London triumph, the Edinburgh disaster, the fact that aristocrats were prepared to wage legal war over this treasure—the painting’s absence must have been noticed. The auction was repeatedly featured in the press, and the Chancery bailiffs would naturally have seized upon the painting if its whereabouts had been known. So where was it?

  Snare promises to remain at 41 Lothian Street in Edinburgh in May 1850. But before and after that he is increasingly elusive, shuffling the cards, slipping between addresses, dodging the bailiffs, his debts. If he lingers in Edinburgh while they are selling off his assets in Reading, the Velázquez will be safe in Scotland with its separate laws. In Edinburgh the picture cannot be distrained by English bailiffs from across the border.

  On the other hand, he might have left Britain already. Perhaps he sails for New York in 1849 before the painting can be seized for auction. Why stay around when he could be showing the painting elsewhere? Why stay in this miserable country?

  There is a clue to the picture’s whereabouts, at least, in the trial itself. George Young makes that cryptic reference that the other side completely fails to pick up. He asks James West, very much in passing, whether he ever heard tell of the picture being on show in another country, to which the loyal West replies that he has not.

  Yet the picture may already have reached New York. Public records suggest that the Velázquez made its first appearance on Broadway in October 1850, whether West knew it or not.