The Vanishing Velázquez

by Laura Cumming

  By now Snare had nothing to lose, having lost everything in Reading except his picture; and perhaps the picture was the only means of support he could think of to provide for his family. He would make it work for its living, he would put it on show in America and send back the ticket money and the takings from selling pamphlets. This was not just any painting, after all, but the rare phenomenon of an actual Velázquez.

  Or perhaps Snare could not bear to be parted from his picture? He had received an offer for it early in 1849, and yet he still refused to sell it, convinced that he possessed the artistic treasure of the age if only he could make people see it, and in as many places as possible. His life’s work—his reputation, his credibility, his faith—had become the painting.

  Sometime between the summer of 1849 and the autumn of 1850, or so it seems, Snare left his wife and children behind and spirited the picture off to a better life in the New World. It is possible that he left before the last baby was born.

  Perhaps Isabella Snare was grief-stricken, devastated, broken; perhaps she was released from an unbearable oppression, and from the picture that had wrecked her life. She did not make the voyage out to New York and he did not return. They never saw each other again.

  • • •

  When Snare set sail for America he was going to the right place at exactly the right time. It was the next most advantageous port of call. He did not speak French, so there was no point in trying Paris, and he could hardly spread the missionary word about Velázquez in Spain. Besides which, part of the attraction was the subject of the portrait: this was the king of England, after all, still of some significance to Americans, and to the British arriving in New York in increasing numbers. Nor was he going off to prospect in some uncharted territory, for New York already had a thriving art scene and Broadway, in terms of galleries, was the equivalent of Old Bond Street.

  On that longest and most crowded of streets there were dozens of dealers, auction houses, restorers and copyists, art suppliers, exhibition halls and galleries. Broadway had, or would soon have, the most reputable dealers in Manhattan—Goupil, Knoedler, Paffs, Henry Leeds, where Old Masters were regularly sold. It had the National Academy of Design, mounting shows by living artists, and the Chinese Assembly rooms for grand panoramas; the American Art Union for American painters, the National Academy of Fine Art for European Masters and the picture galleries of the Stuyvesant Institute. Almost every single novelty and succès d’estime, almost every great name (or painting) was made on Broadway in these years. There was nothing hick or amateur about Snare’s choice. But he did not find his footing easily in all the rush.

  Broadway was so busy with comings and goings that early daguerreotypes show the midday crowds as a speeding white blur. With its jungle of cables and wires, its carriages, horses, omnibuses, messengers and pedestrians, just getting from one side to the other was perilous and people were swept off their feet in the confusion. The throng on the sidewalks was worse. William Bobo’s book Glimpses of New York (1852) describes a stream of beings in bonnets, caps and tall hats as “one grand kaleidoscope in perpetual motion.” But without this din, this squeezing and jamming and bargaining, “this exhilarating music which charms the multitude and draws thousands within its whirl,” the beauty of Broadway would be gone.

  Every second building (literally) had pictures on show: Jacques-Louis David’s Coronation of Napoleon aptly displayed in a social hall—a hundred portraits crammed into a canvas thirty feet wide; Americans queuing more than once around the block to view the dizzying white vortex of Frederic Church’s Niagara in all its Cinemascope grandeur, swagged with velvet curtains and viewed in spotlit darkness at the auctioneers’ Williams, Stevens and Williams. In 1859 Church made $3,000 showing one canvas alone, a magnificent ten-foot panorama of the Andes so dense with botanical detail that visitors were offered opera glasses to view each exotic blossom and bird. Considering that he charged only a quarter a head (exactly what it cost to see “The Velázquez,” as it had been definitively renamed for the American market), this was sensational box office.

  In 1850 you could see Benjamin West’s ever-popular vision of the apocalypse, Death on a Pale Horse, riding melodramatically back into view on Broadway for the fourth time in as many years; and a gallery of Rembrandts at Niblo’s Theatre, where Charles Blondin once walked a tightrope. John Martin’s Last Judgement sailed across the Atlantic to number 353, a three-part apocalypse to rival anything by West, with civilizations toppling into blazing canyons and rocks bursting like popcorn as the sun went out. For those with more refined tastes, Titian’s sumptuous Venus was on display at 449 the same month.

  “Genuine Velázquez at 430 Broadway” announced The New York Times in 1853, in a column on evening entertainments on Broadway that included a performance by the ubiquitous Captain Tom Thumb at one end of the thoroughfare and a production of Hamlet at the other. The Velázquez appeared at a dealer’s gallery and in a print shop, but its most frequent, and prestigious, address in the early years of Snare’s second life in New York was the Stuyvesant Institute.

  A grand white building with a pillared neoclassical façade that would become the first home of the New-York Historical Society, the Stuyvesant had three floors of rooms for all kinds of public events. European paintings and sculptures were regularly presented. Whole museums of artefacts from the ancient world were displayed. Music was performed, politicians gave speeches, clergymen preached sermons and Henry James Senior, father of the novelist, gave a celebrated series of lectures, “The Universality of Art,” in 1851. In his volume of autobiographical essays, A Small Boy and Others, Henry James remembers the Broadway of his youth, where he first saw paintings: “Ineffable, unsurpassable those hours of initiation which the Broadway of the ’fifties had been, when all was said, so adequate to supply. If one wanted pictures there were pictures, as large, I seem to remember, as the side of a house, and of a bravery of colour and lustre of surface that I was never afterwards to see surpassed.”

  James saw Chinese relics and Egyptian mummies at the Stuyvesant Institute, paintings by Watteau and Poussin, West’s Death and Emanuel Leutze’s gigantic image of Washington Crossing the Delaware. Every month there was some new spectacle. “We were shown, without doubt, everything there was.”

  Perhaps he saw “The Lost Velázquez,” too, as the newspapers tended to describe the painting whenever it was shown (there was never, alas, a single illustration in these early papers). The doomed history of the prince was always emphasized, along with the adventures of the picture in Spain and England, before praise of Velázquez. The New York Post spoke of its beauty and solemnity, its uniqueness, its quasi-mystical glow.

  The Stuyvesant was not just a venue for Snare to show the picture. It would become his home and refuge in Manhattan. It was here that he met a young compatriot named Dr. Henry Abbott, a physician who had gone to work in Cairo in the 1830s, where he had become a devoted Egyptologist.

  In Cairo, Abbott amassed more than two thousand artefacts, including mummified bodies and pharaonic headdresses, papyrus scrolls and funeral portraits, all of which were on display at the Stuyvesant Institute in 1853 at the same time as the Velázquez. The two men became friends, and something approximate to colleagues. Snare was described in a newspaper article after his death as having once been the curator of Dr. Abbott’s Famous Egyptian Museum on Broadway.

  The museum was filled with captivating objects—hieroglyphic tablets, cat gods, golden helmets—disinterred from an ancient culture. The poet Walt Whitman was haunted by these visions of another world. He returned again and again; his name appears twenty times in the visitors’ book, and in 1855 he wrote an article for Life Illustrated declaring, “there is nothing in New York now more interesting than this museum.” He had long talks with Dr. Abbott, and in the article mentions Abbott’s disappointment at the American response to the show—which was modest compared to the excitable crowds Tom Thumb could muster along the street—and his fading hope that the city might
one day buy the collection to keep it united.

  The newspapers took up the cause, maintaining such a steady pressure over the years that by 1860 several plutocrats were persuaded to club together to raise funds for the New-York Historical Society to buy the collection. It now belongs, in its entirety, to the Brooklyn Museum.

  But Henry Abbott did not live to hear this news. He had given up hope and returned to Cairo in 1856, where he died in his forties, a disappointed man, barely three years later.

  It does seem that Abbott left Snare in charge of the museum for all or part of the time, for he is described as a curator more than once in the New York City Register in the 1850s, his address given as 659 Broadway. Indeed, he took the responsibility so seriously, people said, that he rarely left the institute and slept in one of the attics. But this diligence had a double purpose, of course, for it also allowed him to guard his own treasure night and day: the Velázquez that meant the world to him, and which he had rescued from danger back home. Now they lived together in a house full of mummies and gods.

  • • •

  Velázquez, until this time, was by no means the best-known Spanish painter in America. That title still belonged to Murillo, his contemporary from Seville, whose pictures of sweet-faced saints and unfeasibly cheerful urchins had captured nineteenth-century hearts across two continents. But, as the century progressed, Velázquez gradually became more popular as prints of his paintings emerged from the newly rolling presses of Fifth Avenue and Broadway. American writers began to praise his unaffected approach to his subjects, whether they were monarchs or slaves, and his palpable independence as a painter. All those years in Rome, yet no bowing down to Italian art; all those years in the shadow of Rubens, but no sign of influence. Velázquez stood free of tradition, free of academic rules, free of the royal court that might so easily have enslaved him with its absurd hierarchies and incessant commissions. Velázquez was an honorary American, an Old Master for the New World.

  This feeling was mainly based on hearsay and prints; hardly anyone could claim to have seen Velázquez’s art at first hand. There are fleeting mentions in handbills and catalogues for New York auctions: a copy, they say; or School of Velázquez, thought to be Velázquez, possibly Velázquez; Americans were more scrupulous about their sales talk in those days than the English. There had already been alarming scandals, including the notorious exhibition of Richard Abraham’s collection of European Masters at the American Academy of Fine Arts in 1830. The catalogue promised Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks, Titian’s Penitent Magdalene in the Wilderness, Raphael’s Adoration and paintings by Velázquez, Watteau, Tiepolo and many more—a dream show, in the truest sense. It is now known that almost every painting was a copy. The theater producer and painter William Dunlap hailed them in his elephantine three-part history of art in the New World as “the best pictures from Old Masters which America had seen.” And sure enough most had been copied directly from Old Masters on behalf of English aristocrats who had developed a taste for art on the Grand Tour.

  Abraham himself was a will-o’-the-wisp, a London dealer who had acquired these pictures by duping their English owners; he was arrested on his arrival in New York. But still the exhibition went ahead. Thousands of people paid fifty cents for the privilege, and the correspondent from the Morning Courier was lost for words at what he imagined to be original masterpieces: “Language would convey but a faint idea of the effect which is produced upon the mind in examining the pictures.” As soon as the show closed, auctioneers sold the lot. The victims in England pressed charges, but eventually settled for selling their family treasures in New York.

  Abraham’s phoney Velázquez was listed as “A Portrait of a Man.” What else?

  Americans in the second half of the nineteenth century often received news of Spanish art through the conduit of British magazines. In 1855 two New Yorkers founded The Crayon, “a journal devoted to the graphic arts and the literature related to them,” which soon became the most respected art journal in America. A few issues along, the editors splashed out on some substantial extracts from Stirling Maxwell’s Annals of the Artists of Spain, specifically those about Velázquez. These homed in on what Pacheco had written about his son-in-law, “that he very early resolved neither to sketch nor to colour any object without having the thing itself before him.” No fantasies, only Nature, an artist’s best teacher: it could have been a motto for Frederic Church, lugging his easel all the way to Niagara.

  But here, too, was Velázquez’s devotion to the common man. “Velázquez had extensive knowledge of the other masters, but still he remained constant in his preference of the common and the actual to the elevated and ideal.” He painted the servants. Stirling Maxwell had a perfect image for this Washingtonian truthfulness, this refusal to be swayed by foreign artists or outside influences: “The oak had shot up with too vigorous a growth to be trained in a new direction.”

  Mercifully for Snare, The Crayon did not publish Stirling Maxwell’s remarks on his picture. Nor did it run a single word on Las Meninas. That marvel was still waiting for an American audience.

  Snare was ahead of his time in New York. Henry Marquand had not yet bought the Velázquez self-portrait he would give to the Metropolitan Museum in 1889. It would be more than a century before the portrait of Juan de Pareja entered the museum. These were the dry pioneer days when nobody owned anything and there was practically a gold rush.

  When the writer from The New York Times described Snare’s painting as a marvel in 1860, urging his readers to make their way as fast as possible to Broadway, he did not ask himself why Snare had never sold the painting, and the accompanying pamphlet offered no direct answers to this question. Rather, it gave a dramatic account of not one but ten legal actions by the executors of some long-dead Scottish aristocrat against the owner, which had dragged on through more than two years in the city of Edinburgh. So one might conclude that he had simply had enough of all this strife, packed the picture in its crate and quit Britain for a fresh start in the New World like so many of his compatriots.

  And now here he was, John Snare, installed in a neoclassical building on the best-known thoroughfare in Manhattan with his Velázquez and receiving the same enthusiastic response from the fourth estate as he had, over a decade before, in Mayfair. Perhaps life was good, and he was free; or perhaps he was desperately trying to make ends meet, sending whatever money he could make home to England.

  New York already had an extraordinarily dynamic press—five newspapers published each morning, two more in the evening—and journalists would come to look at the Velázquez on many occasions over the years, each time with a sense of revelation. In 1859 Robert Shelton Mackenzie, literary editor of The New York Times and a fellow immigrant from the United Kingdom, wrote about the picture with an unusual slant on the vexed issue of the sketch: “Velázquez was commanded to make a sketch of Charles Stuart, Prince of Wales, then on his love-visit to Madrid . . . from which sketch, there is every reason to believe Velázquez painted the portrait of Charles, formerly in the Earl of Fife’s collection, and now in possession of Mr. John Snare, Egyptian Museum New York.”

  Mackenzie’s awed judgment became the general opinion. “It is one of the finest portraits in the world.”

  14

  The Escape Artist

  WE ARE HESITANT with Velázquez’s name in English, wondering whether we have lisped it correctly. El Greco is easy to pronounce. Goya sounds as it looks. Van Gogh we have arrived at as something quite other than the Dutch pronunciation, a sort of harsh anglicization that has long since settled into consensus. But Velázquez is uneasy in any version, properly Hispanicized or not. We do not mention him too often, for all his transcendent genius. His is not a name on most people’s lips.

  It was evidently so in the past as well. Anxiety about the name of this elusive Spaniard whose works were so hard to come by left its trace in the flux of spellings. He was Velasco, Valasky, Valasca, Valasques, like the conjugations of an irregular
verb. In Spain, in his lifetime, he was generally Velásquez or Velázquez. The artist signs his name both ways in the few documents that survive, but he scarcely ever signed a painting; and when they do appear, what is more, these are no ordinary signatures. They are never just functional, only there to put a name to the work; but neither are they flamboyantly expressive. Consider Rembrandt’s intricate jewelry of fine letters; Courbet’s name, left-leaning and revolutionary red; Picasso’s upwardly swooping declaration. Velázquez’s signature, by comparison, is steady and precise and it does not give anything away.

  Signatures point out that a picture is an illusion. They allude to their own whereabouts on the flat surface of the canvas. They ought to get in the way (and sometimes do, in the case of Oskar Kokoschka’s initials, OK, scrawled like a teacher’s terse mark of approval across his own handiwork). But from the Renaissance onwards we have grown so used to words in paintings and particularly portraits—names, ages, dedications, assorted boasts and assertions—that even when a signature has nothing whatsoever to do with the scene, does not share in its composition or even its colors, we do not let it disrupt the illusion. Nobody ceases to find Monet’s visions of waterlilies dreamily persuasive, to take an example, because his backward-leaning name is laboriously lettered across them. But Velázquez goes his own way, as always; he makes the signature part of the illusion.

  One of these rare signatures appears elegantly inscribed on a letter in a most conspicuous place: the gloved hand of Philip IV. The letter is at an angle, as if the king was taking it with him somewhere, or at the very least holding it as part of whatever occasion the painting commemorates, which seems to be more ceremonial than usual since he is not dressed in his customary black clothes, but in a fabulous brown costume embroidered with twinkling silver thread.

  Diego Vela . . . . z