• • •
How easy it would be to draw a contrast between garrulity and silence, between Van Dyck’s incontinent output, overtalking, ceaselessly communicating, never-ending until interrupted by his premature death, with all these sittings like salons where he conversed with his sitters while painting their portraits, nonstop and more and more of it all the time, and Velázquez: taciturn, pensive, watchful, restrained, his output slim and the antipodes of glib.
And yet it is Van Dyck with whom Velázquez is so often confused—that is to say, at a certain point all sorts of paintings by Velázquez were thought to be by Van Dyck, whose name was better known. Perhaps there was even a stage at which it would have been useful for some poor, ill-considered canvas by this greatest of painters to have been mistaken for a Van Dyck so that it would be set before the public instead of buried in the stacks.
The Velázquez that had been a Van Dyck ceased to be mentioned after a while. In 1972 the talk centered entirely on the new Velázquez, the portrait of Juan de Pareja painted in Rome. Not until the twenty-first century did a curator return to the painting, at a time when the Frick’s magnificent portrait of Philip IV—produced in desperately reduced circumstances outside Fraga in wartime—was in the museum’s studios for restoration. The anonymous man was brought alongside it; to the restorer, it appeared dull to the point of dead. Gingerly he cleaned a tiny area and the silvery tones instantly became visible, just as they had for Mayer a century before; just as they had for John Snare.
What became evident was that this was not a highly finished portrait so much as a life study made with startling rapidity, the collar revealed to be no more than a couple of darting strokes, the mustache a fantastical line swept upwards in seconds. The colors, all the way from buff pink to silver, green and many different greys, are exceptionally dilute, and so softly and subtly applied as to appear diaphanous.
Why would Velázquez make this portrait and then incorporate it into The Surrender of Breda? Perhaps because this man had actually been there when the Spanish overcame the Dutch after a yearlong siege and Velázquez’s old friend Spinola accepted the keys to the city. When people say that the man in the hat and the man in the Met must be self-portraits there is the obvious and significant fact, for such a truthful artist, that Velázquez was never at Breda; and he never did anything so predictable as to sign himself as an eyeballing self-portrait on the edge of a crowd.
The Surrender of Breda teems with unique portraits, and this is surely one of them: a vital painting of a man who was actually there, outside Breda, and is really here now with Velázquez.
Has he come to the same part of the palace to be painted as the chamberlain Nieto, in the Apsley House portrait? The light falls from the same angle. Again, the courtier and the artist talk and then fall silent as one poses and the other paints. Perhaps we will one day discover who he was, this tense colleague; but he will still be mysterious because Velázquez allows him his full depth of character. The picture is rapidly achieved, finished in its own terms, but what it shows is a man in mid-thought, mid-breath—like all of us, a work in progress.
• • •
Velázquez’s self-portraits are sighted everywhere and nowhere. He is a man of many faces: with a beard or no beard, a long chin or cheerfully plump cheeks, a nose like a nib or a button mushroom. In Munich he is the dark-eyed man with Hasidic locks and no mustache. In Dresden he has a mustache and a skullcap. He has been Mazo, he has been Nieto and now this thin-faced gentleman. The need to find him in such various faces seems to reflect some sense that he is protean, a chameleon whose colors are never fixed. But it is also a need to bring him closer, to find him among the paintings that have emerged out of Spain into the Old and New Worlds, to discover a face for his character.
But perhaps there is another reason, too. What all these paintings have in common is that intensity about the eyes that is the familiar sign of a self-portrait—that look of looking, that frisson of recognition, that suggests a particular intent, actively seeking out the viewer. This is one of Velázquez’s extraordinary gifts, that he is able to give portraits of other people the freedom and force of self-portraits, as if they were their own creations, sui generis. They appear as if through their own eyes, with their own insight. It corresponds, too, with the old idea that Velázquez could see the truth of each person, that he was a walking mirror.
The oddest aspect of this longing for another face is that he left that definitive image of himself, the very index of the five-second rule: the tall, dark figure behind the canvas, his brush held like the wand with which he has magically summoned everything and everybody in Las Meninas.
• • •
How could anyone fail to notice a Velázquez on a wall, in a museum, at an auction?—that is the irresistible question. Is there something in this art that makes it so hard to identify as his? Why does it seem to defy ordinary analysis? Surely the signature of the artist is there in every brushstroke of the Metropolitan portrait—in the astonishing indistinction where the forehead meets the hair, which simply disappears; in the pearly light that touches the face; in the small irregular dabs that describe the bump in the nose; in the darting marks that pulse through the face and hair. It is that characteristic Velázquez feat: every wild and random stroke falling exactly into place. He did not need to sign his pictures. Or did he?
The mystery of Velázquez’s way of painting—how could he know how little, how thin, what color, what force, what weight and place and point of mark it would take for the eye to see tension, softness, silkiness or breath—has made it almost equally possible for his art to be unrecognized. His paintings appear and disappear in these confusions, vanishing in all their subtlety beneath the burden of varnish, dirt and bewilderment.
In 2011 a Velázquez portrait was discovered in a seaside town in Kent by an auctioneer valuing some paintings for the descendants of a Victorian artist called Matthew Shepperson. Shepperson was a modest painter, mainly known for copying other people’s works and painting quiet portraits of his own. He was also a modest collector, and had picked up this portrait for around seven shillings in the 1820s (less than one-twentieth of the price paid by Snare). The family believed that Shepperson had no idea what he had bought; and neither had they, it seems, for every generation since had assumed that the man with the fine shrewdness in his face and a certain dignity of bearing and costume was in fact Shepperson himself. This was in spite of the golilla collar, the black satin doublet and the Spanish goatee that suggested a quite different country and era.
Perhaps Shepperson thought he had bought a copy of a Van Dyck, cheap at the price; in Victorian times so little was known about the details of seventeenth-century Spanish costume that an Englishman’s falling collar could easily be confused with a Spaniard’s ruff, and vice versa. The gentleman in the portrait has white hair, what is more, so perhaps he was not quite so obviously the Spanish courtier he appears to modern eyes.
Still, it is strange to think that nobody saw the Velázquez for what it was, in all that time; that nobody looked at this work of quicksilver insight and thought it had nothing in common with Shepperson’s country parsons. The painting eventually sold to a New York dealer in 2013; no museum was prepared to bid the highest price. Everyone involved in that sale believes that it is a Velázquez, yet when it was ferried between London, New York and Madrid for appraisal there were specialists who refused to commit themselves because the painting was not in a public collection. It could become a Velázquez only when it had emerged from the wilderness and been sanctified by a museum.
The picture has no other name than Portrait of a Man, though he is evidently a man of judgment and intelligence, a courtier like Nieto or the Metropolitan man, a colleague and perhaps even a friend. Some specialists have identified him as the Master of the Royal Hunt. But one way of discovering more about who painted the picture is through X-rays, which have so extended our knowledge of art. X-rays can put an end to aggravated caution, tell us whose hand i
s at work, reveal the origins, errors and changes in a painting.
How much better (or worse) Snare’s life might have been had he lived in the age of Röntgen.
When this portrait was X-rayed, however, something astonishing came to light—namely, nothing at all. You cannot see any underpainting, correcting, outlining or retouching, you cannot see a beginning or end. There is no trace of the brush at work, only a misty grey blank. And this is the proof, paradoxically, that the painting is his. Even as he was making the man appear, so Velázquez himself was disappearing; the X-ray shows his vanishing act.
15
The Vanishing
I have looked at this portrait till my sight has become dazzled. I have thought of it till my mind has grown confused. My life has been spent trying to discover the proofs of its originality to the neglect of all other pursuits.
The History and Pedigree of the Portrait of Prince Charles, 1847
JOHN SNARE IS a man without a face. No image of him survives. This person who spent most of his life transfixed by a picture of someone else, who lived out his days with that painted face, simply disappears behind it.
He is present in his words, of course, which ran to many thousands, from the first pamphlet in London to the last in New York, the petitions and protests and all the letters he must have written, year upon year, campaigning for his painting, pleading its cause, raising its name in the newspapers of two continents. If ever a man left an expression of his private feelings in the form of public proclamations it was John Snare.
But inside all these words he remains invisible, a blank to anyone who has been following in his footsteps and longs to know what he looked like; and who wouldn’t want to know—to be interested in other people’s faces is almost a test of human solidarity. Would he look like an English version of Brandani the distracted banker, not quite trusted, or quite trustworthy, a showman talking up his picture, slipping off to New York; or would he be more like Don John of Austria, with his gaunt stoop and actor’s energy, living on his nerves? The bookseller of Reading must have had his portrait painted by somebody somewhere, given his love of art, but if this ephemeral image survives, one among millions, it is lost in the tide of time. Perhaps he is destined to remain forever in the shadows, like the watchful retainer on the edge of Las Meninas, his features a hazy blur.
An awkward watercolor exists of Snare’s father, potbellied in those high-waisted early-Victorian trousers that must have been worse for a man than any miniskirt for a woman, revealing so much of what he has, or has not, showing his leg and stomach so unforgivingly. One sees this man, and from his faint face one might deduce something of the son, pale-skinned, dark-browed and busy. It is easy to imagine Snare with Victorian sideburns and beard, to picture him in waistcoat and shirtsleeves, his printer’s hands nimbly manipulating the tiny metal blocks, changing the font once, twice, sometimes six times for an eye-catching handbill. He must have been remarkably quick-witted, too, for he researched and wrote The History and Pedigree in less than four months, with all its tireless, not to say fanatical research and its deep reading on Velázquez.
In Reading, Snare is a gentleman: and proud to describe himself thus in the local census as his business grows. Perhaps he writes an elegant script with the Indian ink he stocks in the shop; perhaps he takes the snuff he sells; perhaps he paints watercolors for the society of which he is a member. I see him leaning on the counter that will later be sold, reading the works of Richard Ford and Mrs. Jameson, homing in on the mentions of Velázquez and teaching himself respectable beginner’s Spanish. Perhaps he is in checked trousers, a bit of a dandy, or all in black with a diamond-pinned cravat. In the Reading Museum is a portrait of his fellow bookseller George Lovejoy, in a black silk suit, heavily whiskered and genial, on the verge of a smile. Perhaps he is more like this?
Anyone can picture Snare’s obsessive zeal and driving energy (how they must have oppressed the life of his wife). He is always talking of the future, compulsively expanding the business, urging the picture onwards, learning more like the avid antiquarian he is. And yet Snare steps free of this picture. With his Dickensian name he irresistibly turns into a Dickensian figure, drawing anyone who seeks him into his snare. He is elusive, perhaps even fugitive, vanishing off to America in silence, never to return; to find him there is to spot a glint of gold in the dust. You can sieve the newspapers and the census forms, the tenancy agreements and the city directories, the stories of shops and shows and pictures on Broadway, the memoirs and letters—did Walt Whitman see the Velázquez, did Mark Twain, did Henry Marquand take an interest?—and all the surviving anecdotes of those who lived and worked on that great boulevard, without finding this wraith in the crowd.
But in the end he is the one snared, caught up by his Velázquez, bound to it, taking it everywhere and never-endingly pressing its virtues home, driving its value through the republic of art.
• • •
When Dr. Abbott returned to Egypt and Snare became his soi-disant curator at the Stuyvesant Institute, the Velázquez found its place in the world again for a few more years. It was on show there, with full advertising, four times between 1850 and 1860. Here was the Englishman in the attic, shrewdly keeping a presence about the building, working for Abbott, helping out with the other shows—Frederick Church, Benjamin West, Paul Delaroche—while protecting the interests of his own picture at all times. He even turned himself into an agent for the premises.
In 1855 he advertises the Lecture Room in the newspapers: commodious, thoroughly lit by gas, with cushioned seats and a stage suitable for exhibitions, concerts, readings and Sunday worship. For terms, apply to John Snare, room no. 22. No political meetings allowed; the Stuyvesant is for artistic and literary purposes only. He lets the second- and third-floor rooms for clubs, religious societies, literary associations and business purposes, but is scrupulous about these, too, they must be first-class businesses, not frauds or fly-by-night salesmen. This is a reputable neighborhood.
In 1856 he opens up the possibility of displaying a new kind of portrait at the Stuyvesant, now that the spacious gallery “has been admirably adapted for the new Daguerre-ian profession.” Photographs are to be shown, though let us never forget the Old Masters; the lighting is good for both.
Snare is still hanging on there as late as 1862, still living above the shop, as it were. It is remarkable that he has managed to remain so long after Abbott’s departure in 1855, especially as the Egyptian collection is no longer on show there, since its purchase by the city. And, sure enough, by 1868 Snare loses his foothold.
Now he shifts the remains of his worldly goods a few doors up Broadway to number 678, floor upon floor of rentable rooms that will soon be demolished to make way for the new Brooks Brothers store. He still refers to himself as J. Snare, Stuyvesant Real Estate, in the City Directory. But soon that title vanishes and he is forced to uplift once again, to number 701 and a bedsit under the eaves high above a music shop. Fractional moves, a little farther from the grand institute every time, yet always on the street where art thrives.
But New York moves at speed and the picture palaces need new paintings every month. He cannot keep showing the Velázquez at a quarter a time, trading on its waning novelty. The painting is not paying its way; and yet still he does not part with it. He survives the Civil War in some poverty, adapting fast, then briefly reinvents himself as a dealer in “objets d’art.” There is no evidence that he managed to buy or sell anything at all.
And then, at some unknown date in the early 1870s, John Snare returns to his first profession. He becomes a buyer and seller of books, working between the publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons on Broadway and Brentano’s bookshop at Union Square.
Scribner’s, future publishers of Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, was already publishing fiction, along with children’s books, religion and philosophy, with huge success. And the pioneering publisher had its pioneering bookseller close at hand in August Brentano. An Aus
trian immigrant who had once sold newspapers outside the New York Hotel on Broadway, Brentano’s great entrepreneurial leap was to gamble all his money on bulk-buying a single issue of the London Times at the docks, for its report of the boxing match between John Heenan of San Francisco and Tom Sayers of England, the first “world title” and the match that changed boxing history. With the proceeds made from this single page of prose, he set up a bigger stall and eventually his own bookshop, Brentano’s Literary Emporium, which blossomed into a chain of shops with an outpost in Paris. The Emporium turned into an empire, eventually merging with Borders Books.
Snare bought from Scribner’s on behalf of Brentano. The narrow passage of Broadway he now walked grew by a few more feet as he negotiated back and forth between the two. Many years later, in 1903, when The New York Times was trying to work out what had become of John Snare and his mysterious Velázquez, a retired member of Scribner’s staff wrote to the paper remembering regular encounters with Snare in the 1870s. “I can call him distinctly to mind, especially as he looked during the winter, because he used to wear a heavy Scottish plaid thrown over his shoulder, and always wore kid gloves and a tall hat.” He stood out, this Englishman in exile, his first life lost, always trying to keep up appearances.
August Brentano’s nephew Arthur, who inherited the business, also recalled Snare from those long-ago days. He was old by now, but still working part-time, toiling back and forth to Scribner’s. And he had one more role, too, as the bookshop’s “versificatory advertiser.” Snare, once compared to Daniel Defoe, was now reduced to rhyming copy.
Arthur Brentano was invited to come and visit the Velázquez up several flights of stairs in Snare’s room at 701 Broadway, but was too young at the time to remember anything about it. By the 1880s he had lost sight of the Englishman altogether.
The Vanishing Velázquez Page 20