By now Snare was in his seventies and still laboring up and down the stairs at 701, still living at the top, with Schirmer’s music store at the bottom, a large family of Prussians on the floor below him and, by touching coincidence, a young printer newly arrived from England. This part of Broadway was beginning to lose its theaters and restaurants as they migrated north towards Fourteenth Street, and the NoHo buildings were either converted into warehouses or demolished. Number 701, Snare’s last perch on Broadway, was gone by the end of the nineteenth century.
In 1880, in the New York City Directory, his profession has dwindled all the way to a single syllable: Books. It is as if his life no longer has any definition at all. But some part of him must have rallied for the census that took place that same year. He could not go down in history so meanly: in that document, among the dressmakers, violinists and house cleaners, he appears with a better phrase, and some small claim to truth after all, as “John Snare, Dealer in Works of Art.”
• • •
There is a passage in The History and Pedigree where Snare talks of humble people falling in love with portraits. “They often treasure and even love an old likeness without desiring to know whom it was designed to personate. They grow familiar with it, and in a short time become fond of it. They talk to it and address it by some name, as if it were a living being.” He might have been describing himself.
But by the time of that census Snare had lived with his portrait for more than thirty years. He had saved it twice from kidnap; carried it the length of Britain by trap and train; and all the way across the Atlantic, cut from its frame and rolled up in a tarpaulin, or a tin box, or under Mrs. Snare’s petticoats (there were increasingly high-colored theories, though there seems no reason to discredit the crate made by the Radley carpenter). They had shared a town house in Reading, a hotel in Edinburgh, a ship, the Stuyvesant Institute and now a cold-water tenement on Broadway. He had devoted most of his professional life to its cause. He lived with it—eye to eye, face-to-face—unable to part with it for any money, and yet he never seems to have grown tired of it, or angry with it for bringing his family to ruin; he only loved the picture more. Amour fou, love unto madness.
Everyone who left a written memory of Snare in Manhattan spoke of his habitual talk of the painting, of his infatuation with it. But the testimony always takes the form of indirect speech until one spring day in 1860, when a journalist from out of town happens to pay a visit to Broadway.
“We saw, a few days since, two very remarkable sights at the Stuyvesant Institute. One was the picture by Velázquez and the other,” he writes, “was the present possessor Mr. Snare.”
“A Letter from New York,” signed only by “G,” was the jewel of the Buffalo Courier, a weekly column that brought pictures of the metropolis to the people of Buffalo, three hundred miles upstate on the shores of Lake Erie. Its portrait of city life was so eloquent and acute that one can’t help wondering about G’s identity; it is well known that Mark Twain wrote for the paper.
G is sending back news of the craze for art in Manhattan, particularly this spring, when the rest of America is looking at real live blossoms outdoors, but New Yorkers have to make do with painted flowers instead, which of course they believe to be infinitely superior:
New York is glowing with new pictures just now, and everybody who can see a “brown spot” will talk of light and shade, neutral tints, perspective, Chiaro-O-scuro, and the schools of design, and style, and locate every brush to suit their know-nothingness, and impress their hearers—not listeners—with their effete decisions. They will be egotists in their criticisms and egotists in their praise. Titian, Raphael, Correggio, Vandyck, and a host of others will rest uneasily in their dusty sleep, if they were not mummified with lint in their ears.
Everybody will claim for the pictures of their painted friends, beauties and virtues which could make Michael Angelo blush in his grave to hear, if they were bestowed upon his name and these same everybodies will insist that true merit is never rewarded in this world. We wonder if there will not be a good picture gallery in the next dominion, where deserving and rejected sketches will be properly appreciated and praised? Personal interest so blinds all our eyes that we can’t tell a gallot from a galleon, if it sail down the stream by our shallop.
In this vanity fair, where every painting is a Raphael, and every gallery-goer an expert, it is hard to find a true picture or a teller of truth. But G believes he has come across one, or possibly both, he is not quite sure, at the institute.
He stands before the Velázquez with some awe. That it is the picture painted in Madrid he feels sure, but it is so much more than its subject:
It is, certainly, in many respects the most remarkable picture when viewed through a glass that we ever beheld. There is a blending of colors, and a finish that resembles porcelain. The eye when magnified has the appearance of the purest Mother of Pearl. Before this work of Art Mr. Snare stands day after day, and month after month, with the gas light falling upon his darling possession—as if to do honor to the poor dead King, whose semblance is so precious only through the gifted hand that fixed his features upon canvas.
Snare tells G the story of the auction, and how terrified he was at the “assemblage of connoisseurs, and how disgusted when it was struck down to him for the paltry sum of eight pounds sterling. He felt as if the painting had been insulted.” He tells of tracing its whereabouts from servants with very vague memories all the way to Fife House in Whitehall and the puzzle of how it found its way out of there, which “nobody knows, and Mr. Snare cares most as it is dearer to him than home.” G relates the adventures of the picture up to the Edinburgh trial, and how Snare managed to turn the tables on the Trustees. And now he has come to America, “where he strays with his beloved Velázquez—as if it were a thing of life, and returned his devotion.”
“To see his eyes sparkle when one appreciates it, and to see them glow with indignation at a failure to satisfy with its history is worth a visit to its hiding place. A doubt as to its genuineness he receives as a personal insult, and he would defend it with his life.”
Nor will he ever sell it.
“Said Snare: ‘If England wants this picture, she shall possess it, but no man shall ever own it while I live. I would expire before it first.’ ”
• • •
Those who own Old Masters are keenly aware of their frailty, of the painful truth that they must be handled and transported and treated like objects, no matter how magical they may be as works of art. That responsibility does not burden the rest of us. We are free to admire without a care, to believe or disbelieve, love or loathe what we see without thinking about its flaking pigment and damp patches, the alarmingly threadbare state of the canvas or the heavy question of who painted it. We do not have to live with it, look after it or stake our reputation on its authenticity. The ownership of art in the days before more exacting forms of authentication existed than the proverbial practiced eye (and even in the present, when paintings are blue-chip investments, ruinously expensive to insure) carried its evident risks, and John Snare fell prey to so many of them.
When the portrait appeared in Charles Curtis’s definitive 1883 catalogue of Spanish paintings by Murillo and Velázquez, it was with the author’s comment that Snare could not bear to show it in public anymore since it had brought him so much trouble.
Curtis was an American scholar, a devotee of Spanish art and an avid buyer of prints after paintings by Velázquez and Murillo—the “working collection,” as he called it, on which his enormous inventory of their works was based. He gives a faithful description of the portrait of Prince Charles, so faithful in fact that one realizes he has extracted it from Snare’s own account in the Stuyvesant pamphlet. It is hard to believe that Curtis ever saw the painting himself. It is admitted to his catalogue, it is true, although he notes that not all connoisseurs are persuaded of its authenticity. But his own testimony takes the reader no closer to the truth of the picture.<
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A picture that is gradually receding from view, to the extent that nobody seems to see it—or write about seeing it—during the remaining years of Snare’s life. It is not shown in public, perhaps it is scarcely seen in private by anyone but the young Arthur Brentano in the late 1870s. It is fading out as other stars are being born: the new pictures by Velázquez that are beginning to arrive in America through the auspices of dealers such as Wildenstein, Duveen and Christie.
But at least one more person saw it on Broadway before John Snare’s death, and that person was his youngest child, Edward.
The nameless male infant born in Reading the summer of the bankruptcy sale grew up and came to visit the father he had perhaps never met. He is there in the passenger manifests: Edward Snare, Engineer, disembarking from the Lydian Monarch on April 20, 1882.
If one imagines John Snare simply vanishing without a care, leaving his family in the lurch, sidestepping all duty and debt to escape, Edward’s arrival argues against this. Perhaps whatever money Snare could save in New York had been going back to Berkshire after all. Arthur Brentano, in The New York Times article of 1903, says that some of the older colleagues at the bookshop could remember nothing about the Velázquez, which they never saw, but they did recall Snare talking about his family back home, the sons and daughters he had not seen for decades. The kaleidoscope shifts. Perhaps it was a great sacrifice to be parted from his family; perhaps Mrs. Snare asked him to leave; perhaps he was dragging the family down. One sees the intrepid son taking the long passage to the New World to find his long-lost father, determined to make his acquaintance. What did he find? Heartbreak, if nothing else: an old man in an attic with a painting he once could have sold so that he never had to work again; an old man fixated and yet faltering, who cannot quite recall his own age on the census but retains every detail of the painting.
Edward’s visit prompted a singular and telling event. In early 1883 John Snare made his way to the immigration offices at Washington Square, a few city blocks down Broadway, and applied for American citizenship. He had been living in America for more than thirty years.
Perhaps there was a sense of mortality now that he was in his seventies. His children would have been liable for death duties in England if they had inherited the painting while Snare was still a British citizen; here was a legal loophole. Or perhaps Edward’s visit brought dismal reminders from home, the memory of what had happened in Britain, the sense that he hadn’t quite been believed and the realization that he would never see the rest of his family again. There was nothing left to tie him to England and he had made the best he could of his life in New York, so he might as well sign up for good.
But John Snare was an American citizen only for a mayfly moment. He signed the papers in March 1883. All trace of him dies out that year.
• • •
It seems possible that Curtis never spoke to Snare at all, never actually met him in time for his hugely influential book on Velázquez and Murillo, that he was working from the pamphlet and perhaps a letter; that the picture “withdrawn from public view” had in fact already vanished with Snare’s death, disappearing along with his effects.
Except that there is one last sighting in America, and it is in the grandest possible location.
“A large picture in the west end of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is attracting a great deal of attention,” reports the New York Tribune of June 9, 1885. “It is loaned by Edward Snare, the son of the late John Snare, of Reading, England, the discoverer of the picture. The face is handsome and the fingers and hands eminently aristocratic. It is evidently an old masterpiece, though connoisseurs are divided.”
In its early years, from its first Fifth Avenue home to the later building on the Upper East Side, the Metropolitan Museum had numerous exhibitions of art loaned by collectors and dealers. The museum had not yet amassed its permanent collection, but displayed Old and New Masters at these temporary shows. The Rembrandt that Snare bought at Stowe appeared at just such an event, and now here was the Velázquez.
Edward Snare had achieved something remarkable by loaning the painting to the museum, flying the flag in memory of his father. The picture had at last ascended to its rightful position in America’s great pantheon of art.
If only John Snare had lived to see the day. The last person to describe seeing him alive, in the 1880s, is his former Scribner’s colleague who visits him at 701 Broadway. Of the Velázquez, this man says only that it was so precious Snare refused to let it out of his sight. Of the living quarters, however, he remembers the darkness and the bleak redolence of onions; the poor man’s food—fried onions on Broadway.
• • •
I searched for the physical traces of Snare’s passage through life and found them nowhere. His birth certificate is gone. Perhaps he was born in 1808, for there is a baptismal record from that year; but Snare seems confused about the matter himself, giving two different ages to successive editions of the New York census. By 1880 he says he may be “about 70,” but clearly doesn’t know or can no longer remember.
What did his handwriting look like? For half a second I thought I saw his signature on a copy of Proofs of the Authenticity in the Victoria and Albert Museum, but the names were the wrong way around: Snare John, inscribed in fading copperplate, the mark of a Victorian librarian.
Looking for the history of the lost Velázquez, I searched in the same places as John Snare, perhaps touching the same objects, looking through the same editions of rare books, certainly reading the same documents, sales guides and catalogues. But it never brought him any closer as a once-living presence. He slips through the ordinary documents—births, marriages, deaths, leaving no last will and testament. There is no record of his death, how or when he died, whether he was alone, where his body is buried. Perhaps he was given an unmarked grave on Hart Island along with New York’s paupers and John Does, the city’s anonymous dead.
I want to know what he looked like, but it might be too much. There could be something there to dismay. We are not our faces, or so we say, but Snare’s face might carry a nuance of suffering or mania. His character is there in pamphlet after pamphlet, cause after cause, a man walking the same few streets of his neighborhood in Reading, then London, then New York, tirelessly active; chronically striving. He is poor by the end, but still hard at it, still working.
Perhaps a face exists somewhere, a daguerreotype taken at one of the new booths on Broadway in the 1860s, or in that gallery in the Stuyvesant Institute. Perhaps there is a carte de visite somewhere in New York; or perhaps it long ago ended up with all the other unidentified faces in those boxes at flea-market stalls. The Englishman vanishes into the speeding white blur of Broadway.
It may be a mercy to have no likeness of Snare, for a photograph might be too momentary or partial, too disappointing or disturbing. Faces do not always fit. Let him remain a fine mystery in this respect. Whatever he was, the totality of the man himself can never be portrayed in one image.
• • •
In 1888 Scribner’s published the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Its entry on Velázquez mentions the portrait of Prince Charles. Although the painting’s exact whereabouts are apparently unknown, three years after the show at the Metropolitan Museum, “it is said to be still in America.”
The New York Times took up the pursuit in 1903. After interviewing a few surviving members of the staff at Brentano and Scribner’s to no avail, the article comes to its conclusion about the painting and its owner: “Snare was comparatively well known in this city from 1854 to 1883, but careful inquiry has failed to establish that he survived into 1884 and the fate of ‘The Lost Velázquez,’ which was certainly in his possession at the close of the civil war, and said to have been held by him in 1881, has not been learned.”
Some weeks later, a letter in response to the article arrived from one of Snare’s former Minster Street employees, then a teenage apprentice, now retired to the county of Suffolk:
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ever quite lost touch with his family, and I heard that he had found employment in some institution in New York. In 1883, I was in New York myself for a short time. So one day I went into a bookseller’s and asked to be allowed the use of a directory. I found my gentleman’s address, at the top of a lofty building on Broadway, but when I got there the bird was flown. I lost all further trace. But the question remains still: Where is the Velázquez? There is a nut to crack.
16
Seeing Is Believing
WHERE ARE ALL the paintings from the last ten years of Velázquez’s life? This is an abiding mystery of his professional career. It is true that he was hardly prolific, painting perhaps only as many as half a dozen pictures a year while accomplishing all his duties as a courtier, but on his return from the second trip to Rome he seems to have painted less and less. Some paintings were lost in a fire at the Alcázar palace and it is possible that others, of which we know nothing, were once made. But the numbers dwindle until he seems to be painting only one or two pictures in the final decade, and then perhaps no paintings at all.
When Velázquez sailed reluctantly home from Rome in 1650, it was to the court of a terminally disappointed monarch. Philip’s sister had died; his beloved son Baltasar Carlos had died; a plague had reduced Seville’s population by almost half. The king had a new wife, and babies were beginning to arrive, but one son did not live long and another was so damaged by inbreeding that he would die, prematurely senile, in his thirties; he was the last of Spain’s Hapsburg rulers. Portugal and Catalonia were rising up against Spanish rule, partly over the devastating war with France that had never let up for twelve years, destroying many thousands of lives and emptying the state coffers. By 1654, to the horror of a visiting emissary, there were days when the royal household could no longer pay for bread. And yet it is in this country, at this time, and for this court, that Velázquez would paint Las Meninas.
The Vanishing Velázquez Page 21