The Vanishing Velázquez

by Laura Cumming

  The loss of a painting may be devastatingly final by water or fire. But it may be nothing so sudden or conclusive, more like a gradual fading away. Portraits lose face when their subjects are discredited, their names forgotten or their status relegated by history. Or they just become the victims of oblivion and ordinary neglect, waiting on a wall, in the stacks of a museum, forgotten among the other white elephants in the loft. We press on with our lives; and then they outlive us. One day they may turn up by accident, design or chance, their rediscovery as random or mysterious as the circumstances in which they were originally lost.

  There is now on view in the Reading Art Museum a picture which possesses a remarkable history, and which will revive in the minds of older inhabitants of the town recollections of persons and events that together constituted a curious and marked sensation. The picture in question is a portrait of Prince Charles by the celebrated Spanish painter Velázquez, and it forms part of a collection of seventeen works of art, including several that are valuable, which have been kindly lent to the Reading Museum Committee by Mrs Snare, widow of Mr John Snare, who for many years in the early part of the century carried on business at 16 Minster-street, Reading.

  It is the last week of December 1888. John Snare and his Velázquez have been gone from England for almost forty years and the writer of the article in the Reading Observer realizes that his younger readers may know nothing of the picture, which he does not describe, despite the fact that the Observer’s offices are just across the road from the museum. The appeal of his story lies entirely with the bookseller, his extraordinary purchase at Radley Hall and their subsequent adventures together. The writer is too humble to give an opinion of the portrait and, in deference to Mrs. Snare and the museum, not to mention the status of his own story, makes no mention of the auction, either.

  What else was in that memorial show, as Mrs. Snare might have conceived of it in respect to her late husband? No other records survive. Perhaps some of the other works were unsold relics of that auction, which had been with her (or with Snare) ever since. The writer says nothing about them, but he offers a tiny portrait of his own.

  “Mr Snare possessed qualifications and characteristics that made his shop the resort of many besides the ordinary run of mankind, who often came as much out of curiosity and for friendly intercourse as to make purchases . . . He gratified a taste for high art until he came to be regarded as a local connoisseur and to possess paintings that made his shop a sort of semi-art exhibition.”

  This is the nearest thing to an obituary Snare ever received.

  • • •

  One marvels at the loyalty—or the continuing resourcefulness—of Isabella Snare, a woman forced to fend for herself and her children for decades without a husband, lumbered with his paintings, including the portrait of young Charles that she might have hoped never to see again. What was she to do with them? Like the widows of artists and collectors throughout history, she finds herself burdened, with nowhere to hang them, nowhere to store them. So she lends them to the local museum, conscious of their worth, and gives the local paper some words about Radley Hall and the Edinburgh trial, plus one of Snare’s pamphlets to fillet for tips on Velázquez. These appear almost verbatim in the article, which concludes with an odd abruptness: “Mr Snare carried his picture across the Atlantic and exhibited it in America, where, we believe, he continued to reside.”

  “We believe” seems such a strangely qualifying remark.

  Isabella’s tale is one of bravery and sorrow. She was in her early thirties when Snare sailed for America, leaving her to raise four children alone, one of them perhaps no more than a baby. After the 1849 auction, with every last fitting sold off in full view of her entire social world, she moved from one Reading address to another, relying on the kindness of her side of the family. In 1861 she found a perch with her father, Thomas, a retired banker, at Southcote Lane; perhaps it was he who found work for both of Isabella’s sons. Howard worked as a clerk, Edward spent three years at Simonds’ Bank, a few yards from the old Minster Street shop. He also lived on and off with Isabella’s brother, Bossom Williams, a London clerk whose several short-lived enterprises included importing cigars from Havana.

  The family moved one last time, to a detached house in the village of Hurst outside Reading in the 1870s, but by then Isabella’s eldest daughter, Margaret, had died, and her youngest daughter, Jessie, passed away in 1880; both were carried off by nameless illnesses in their thirties. Edward had to carry this sadness to his father when he sailed away to New York.

  The final history of the Snares in England emerges in fragmentary details. Howard was taken ill during a visit to Norwich in 1891 and died after “a very few hours,” according to the inquest. He was in his fifties. A few months later exactly the same thing happened to Isabella Snare on a visit to her niece in London in 1891. She was gone within a day, having endured the deaths of all of her children except Edward.

  Edward Snare’s life was one of infinite trouble. His exact career is uncertain, except that he did not last long at Simonds’ Bank, or in his next job with the Civil Service. In the 1881 census, he is lodging with his uncle in Deptford, describing himself as a “Colonial Engineer,” but the following spring he has set sail for New York. He cannot have stayed long (it is not clear how the painting came to be in the Metropolitan Museum, or how it returned to England) for he is soon off to Africa to find work as an engineer. On his return Edward seems to have lost himself to drink. Although he inherited money from Howard, he must have gone swiftly through those funds and whatever Isabella bequeathed him in 1891, for he was reduced to selling off the Hurst furniture soon after her death.

  Edward remained rootless and restless, wandering between Hurst and Reading. And it was in Reading that he was charged, more than once, with being drunk and disorderly and failing to turn up at court for the proceedings.

  On a January afternoon of 1897 Edward was drinking his way between Minster Street and Castle Hill. The inquest tells a desperate tale of a falling-down drunk, his eye black from hitting the pavement, rambling on about the kindness of the folks at the alehouses, rescued from the freezing night by a passing stranger who somehow persuades a local landlady to take him in. A bowl of mutton broth, a blanket, and then death must have occurred sometime between 7 and 10 p.m., when the landlady went up to check on him again. Edward Snare was forty-eight. The good woman weeps: “poor soul, he did not take care of himself.”

  Bossom Williams, at the inquest, is very sure that his nephew was of “ample means.” But this man who had once lent a painting to the Metropolitan Museum left only a modest sum. Edward’s executors were the Hurst neighbors—one of them a printer, as if for old times’ sake.

  There is no mention of the Velázquez in Edward’s will, and neither he nor any of his siblings married or had children. Bossom Williams does not seem to have inherited the portrait; he died two years later in London, leaving only £60 to divide between his spinster daughters. So where was the painting?

  In 1890 Isabella Snare put some of the pictures from the Reading Museum exhibition up for sale. But the Velázquez was not among them. It passed to Edward, who did not sell it, either, even in his hour of need, flogging off the furniture at Hurst. That it was in his possession when he died is borne out by a story in The Times of July 1901, which says that “the Velázquez” had been offered for sale in 1898 “by the order of the executors of the late Mr Edward Snare.” How it came into their hands is not clear, since it was not in his will; it seems that the picture did not sell.

  There is one last mention of John Snare in the press. The Times was running the story about the Velázquez to advertise a final sale, “A Collection of Pictures By Old and Modern Masters formerly belonging to the late Mr John Snare of Reading shortly to take place at Willis’s Rooms in St James’s Square in Mayfair.”

  In the list of works going under the hammer are some old friends from the Minster Street auction in 1849, including the girl in the bonnet. Bu
t Velázquez’s portrait of Prince Charles is not there.

  • • •

  Number 16 Minster Street is gone, pulled down in the 1930s to make way for new shops. So are the tall buildings on Broadway where John Snare once lived, every single one gone; and all of the places in New York where he worked. There is no grave. There were no direct descendants to pass on the tale of his life, no grandchildren to inherit the portrait.

  The last, unconfirmed sighting is the 1898 auction when the painting remains unsold; and surely returns to the place where it has been sleeping for a decade already: the vault of a bank, the bank where Edward once worked, where Isabella perhaps kept whatever money they had left—Simonds’ Bank in Reading.

  The portrait is turned to the wall and left to decline. Perhaps it lies there for years, from the time of its return to England to the late days of Edward’s ruin, his mother’s death and then his own in the harshness of winter. It is casually forgotten, at first; and then one by one they are all gone. There is nobody left to remember.

  Woodworms chew their way through the frame, moths lay their lethal eggs on the picture. Mildew creeps slowly across the image, while the paint gradually changes color. Damp clouds those mother-of-pearl eyes. The canvas sags. The portrait decays.

  Simonds’ Bank was sold to Barclays in 1908. The lingering contents of the vaults may have been disposed of, it is true, or they may have remained exactly where they were as the owners changed hands. Barclays simply swept up the business, and the customers, and kept on going for another century, until the King Street doors finally closed in 2008. There is no record of the picture.

  Unless it escaped this fate and is still out there on a wall somewhere in the world, handed down through some other family, its name decoupled from that of John Snare. Perhaps someone is walking past it even now, without noticing it at all. Or maybe nothing remains of it except the tantalizing trace of its long-ago existence in words. This dream of a picture that cannot be seen, what was it after all?

  The loyalty of the Snares may prevent us from knowing. For nobody ever let the painting go. Every successive member of the family to whom it passed, from Howard to Isabella to Edward, faithfully honored Snare’s own words in Proofs of the Authenticity of the Portrait of Prince Charles all those decades ago:

  The picture is not for sale, and the reader will excuse me if I take this opportunity of publicly announcing my intention to retain it. It has to me a value that to no other person it could possibly possess. The manner in which I procured it was extraordinary—the means that enabled me to establish it are no less curious. I have laboured hard and suffered something to make the world appreciate its worth. My feelings and my pride render the object dear to me. Could I part with this, it is not in the fortune of a life to discover such another. Humble as I am, I cannot help acknowledging a sense of triumph when I look back upon the history of this work.

  18

  An Infinite Number of Charleses

  SOME MONTHS AFTER I first came across John Snare’s pamphlet in the library, the dust shimmering and shaking on its desiccated pages, I went to visit the only other person, to my knowledge, who had ever written anything about him. Diana Mackarill is a historian in the Centre for Ephemera Studies at the University of Reading. She specializes in typography and had published a brief but elegant pamphlet about this local man, illustrated with fine examples of his printing. But she warned me against pursuing Snare any further. Too much of her time, she darkly observed, had been lost trying to unravel the tangled threads of his story.

  We sat drinking coffee a few yards from Minster Street, pondering Mrs. Snare’s humiliation in the face of the family lawsuits and the bankruptcy auction. Neither of us had discovered what happened to the printing presses, unmentioned in the catalogue, and she, too, believed that Snare had spirited the painting to America to escape the auctioneers.

  Of its current status Mrs. Mackarill was certain: the painting was gone, and the publication of her pamphlet in 2007 had prompted no further news of it. No relatives had come forward; nobody claimed to have seen it. I asked whether she had ever wanted to see it herself. “Oh, but I have,” she said, causing my heart to turn over at the thought of some long-ago sighting. “It is all described in that big American book by Charles Curtis. I don’t need anything more.”

  But I needed more. In those days I wanted to see the painting all the time and not just out of native curiosity or the chance, however small, of setting eyes on another Velázquez. I didn’t know what to think about Snare himself. Every new discovery tilted the balance: did he really know what he had, and what did he have? The questions were fused. To believe in Snare meant believing in his portrait, too, or so it seemed to me at the beginning; and later, as more of his struggles emerged, it seemed just as important to see what had caused so much suffering. The painting would carry the truth.

  In all the time of searching for Snare I was looking for the painting, too, of course, and always in a state of ready hope. It would be just around some corner, its location revealed any day now; and when I could not find the actual canvas, I naturally assumed there would be a print; and if not a print, then surely a catalogue reproduction; and if not a catalogue, then surely a photograph in a newspaper or book. Only when nothing turned up did I make an appointment to go to the very place where I might find a ghostly trace of the painting, and perhaps even of John Snare. But I went in a state closer to dread than hope. What if there was nothing—or something far worse?

  • • •

  In a back alley in the heart of London is a library of faces. Discreet and hushed, with old-fashioned index cards and heavy box files, it is not much visited except by the staff of the National Portrait Gallery to which it belongs. The purpose of this place is to keep a photographic record of all the portraits of notable Britons ever painted from life—every one of them, if possible, from the masterpieces in public museums to the portraits in private houses, people’s attics and even their caravans. Everyone who matters, by anyone who ever painted their portrait: it is a valiant, if never-ending enterprise.

  Battalions of green boxes, A–Z, hold more than a million photographs stretching back to the dawn of the camera age. Each represents more than a face, and more than just a painting, for time’s passage is also measured in these photographic images. Here is a daguerreotype of Holbein’s Thomas More as the portrait used to look in 1860, that acute face dimmed by three hundred years of grime. Here is Joshua Reynolds’s Dr. Johnson, once robust, but already disintegrating when the photographer stood before it a century later. Calotypes, talbotypes and sepia photographs made using enormous box cameras show how works of art once looked, uncleaned, to the people of the past. And in some cases they are relics of lost paintings, too, images of works that have long since disappeared.

  It is a black-and-white world—“This mechanical souvenir cannot do justice to my painting’s brilliant hues,” writes one frustrated collector on the back of the Edwardian photograph he has submitted—although there are occasional forays into color. A seventies snap of William Shakespeare shows the Bard in a flaring orange Polaroid; not that the subject looks anything like the portly egghead of the First Folio engraving in any case. No, this is a far better Shakespeare, a suave and handsome adventurer with luxurious hair: not William Shakespeare, but Walter Raleigh.

  The guesses of hopeful owners—and the terse corrections of curators—are inscribed on the back. These identifications are a combination of aspiration, scholarship and comical error. For every photograph taken by a specialist, and meticulously attributed, there is another by an owner who believes that his or her heirloom deserves a place in the library, even though the subject is not really Shakespeare, Raleigh or any other British notable, but some anonymous wooden-faced ancestor. The library rules are rigorously democratic. If you believe you have a contemporary portrait of Elizabeth I, then your photograph goes into one of the boxes devoted to Gloriana, no matter how poor the painting or how far-fetched the guess, if there is no
other candidate for identity. An exasperated curator may be quite sure this is some other redhead in a farthingale, but must still file it under E I if no other name comes to mind. The library is a tremendous assembly of portraits, but it is also a portrait in itself, of people’s dreams and delusions as much as our affinity for painted faces.

  In this great repository of photographs, Shakespeare to Cromwell, Charlie Chaplin to Tony Blair, the hardest subject to bring into focus is also the one who turns out to require the largest number of boxes in British history: King Charles I.

  Charles is filed first as a boy with big eyes and an unformed face, easily confused with his older brothers Henry, who would have been king had he not died at eighteen; so easily confused, in fact, that several photographs actually show portraits of Henry. Here’s the young Henry with a candy-striped stick, or is it Charles? Here’s the young Charles in a perky hat, or is it Henry?

  With Henry’s death in 1612, that confusion ends, but still there are so many portraits of the future king they have to be classified by facial hair. The boxes are labeled “Charles Without Moustache” and naturally “Charles With Moustache” (but only from the age of nineteen to twenty-four).

  Sometimes this mustache is so puny it looks more like a trick of the light, particularly in shadowy old photographs, so this seems an unreliable criterion. But facial hair has a secondary function, which is precisely to divide his princely life in two, for the next file heralds the dawn of the figure we know and recognize: “Prince Charles With Beard.” He went to Spain without a hair on his chin and came home, one contemporary writer noted with surprise, or perhaps affront, given the expense of the adventure, “full of gaiety and now bearded.” This beard is a proper Spanish beard, what is more, elegant, pointed and dark. It is exactly like the beards in Velázquez.