Here is the first place where Snare’s picture might be filed. But not a single photograph in “Charles With Moustache (19–24)” shows a portrait that looks anything like his account of the Velázquez.
After the Spanish Match, the images run wild. There are tens, twenties, hundreds of different portraits of the king in silk with his pearl-drop earring, with his wife, with his children, at Whitehall Palace or Hampton Court, on horseback or out on some Civil War battlefield. There are novelty portraits in stained glass, wax and porcelain. There is an anamorphic head, and a sketch made inches from the king during his final trial; there are even paintings of the execution—anti-portraits, you might say—and one showing the head ghoulishly stitched back onto the body. There is even a drawing made on the spot as the corpse was exhumed 165 years later, the skull still patched with a wisp of that famous beard.
What did Charles I really look like? He has the face of a B-movie actor—almost handsome, strangely anonymous. As a beardless young man, his appearance is so amorphous that some of these large-eyed youths could be almost anyone—a point irritably noted by several curators. The Spanish beard was the making of him as a prince; and later on, in a more literal sense, so was the arrival at court of Van Dyck. For all these different Charleses eventually converge into one consolidated image: the long-faced, sad-eyed, silken-haired sovereign created by the Flemish artist.
If ever a painter could be said to have invented a look, and not just a style, it was Van Dyck. This look was his lasting gift to English art and perhaps to English people as well. For you can still see it everywhere, that particular air of nonchalant self-assurance, somewhere between detachment and languor, which protects and glamorizes the bearer: the essence of cool. You see it in the soaring portraits of Cavaliers leaning carelessly against classical columns in their golden jackets, or throwing a glance of penetrating indifference in our direction. You see it in those aristocrats effortlessly calming their nervous dogs and, above all, in Charles sitting back in his chair, finger to pensive temple as if he were not just a king but a philosopher, too, urbane, profound, contemplative.
Van Dyck knew how to flatter. But he can’t seem to stop himself from subverting all this glamour with strange, contradictory details. It might be a faint sheen of sweat, a flaccid glove or a sharp thorn tucked into a swelling bodice. Oddest of all is the famous triple portrait of Charles. On the right, in three-quarters, the king is a suave Cavalier with an earring. Front on, he is the highbrow scholar-soldier he wished to be. But on the left, he has the weak profile of a vain dilettante. This portrait was sent to Rome so that Bernini could carve a bust from the likeness. Even he, the biggest flatterer of all, couldn’t quite eliminate that note of decadence.
Like Bernini, Van Dyck was a workaholic. He painted in every genre, made thousands of etchings, produced portraits of entire families within days. His London studio was like a Harley Street waiting room, the rich and famous queuing for a session with the cosmetic surgeon. But what is so often missing in his portraits is a sense of anything beyond the present. They have no moral dimension, no deep empathy with the sitter, with his or her unique character, or sense of life, ticking away towards death. Van Dyck cannot compare with Velázquez for spiritual or emotional depth. His gift is for speed and motion, for surefire acuity, for catching the moment on a wing. He died at forty-two, most probably from overwork, just before the glittering society he portrayed was obliterated by war. The proof of that workload is there in these boxes of photographs: portrait after portrait of Charles.
I opened each box devoted to Van Dyck and his many followers with increasing ambivalence. Snare’s painting appeared in the Radley Hall catalogue as a supposed Van Dyck, and some elements of his description made it sound like a Van Dyck, too—the armor, the baton, the battle in the background (although there is also one in Velázquez’s Don John). Snare believed the portrait was too early for the Flemish painter, but he might well have been wrong. And Velázquez painted Charles only once, whereas Van Dyck had painted so many portraits, and had so many imitators, that the likenesses multiplied towards infinity. They are still turning up. Snare hadn’t just hit upon the commonest of royal subjects, so to speak; he had hit upon the most prolific and imitated of royal painters. The odds were against Velázquez.
They were also against Van Dyck, to an almost farcical degree, for the owners of the paintings in the files. Time and again the curators correct some optimist who believes he or she has a genuine Van Dyck when in fact it is a Honthorst, a Mytens, a copy by one of those Stuart painters of whom we know so little, or not a portrait of the king at all. If Van Dyck had actually painted all the portraits of Charles attributed to him he would have died much sooner.
Miss Daniell has one at 2 Poplar Avenue, Hull, in the 1920s. There is one in haunted Glamis Castle. Lord Grantham has one (the real Lord Grantham, though his Downton Abbey counterpart also has one in the dining room). Major Spearman in the German Section of the Foreign Office acquires one at the end of the Second World War (one wonders how), just as Herr Wilhelm Kraushaar is sending his implausible submission all the way from Berlin. Two ladies from Surrey turn up in the sixties with a photograph of their family treasure and are most politely, if sadly, undeceived. It is only a copy of a Honthorst.
Van Dyck’s majestic coronation portrait of Charles in velvet and ermine crops up time and again. There are not half a dozen copies, but a stupendous sixty-three. The image breeds. After this muddy torrent, you long to see the clear original, but it was lost (along with Bernini’s bust) in the fire that destroyed Whitehall Palace in 1697, all except for the Banqueting Hall, outside which Charles was executed.
Sifting through all these images for Snare’s portrait is like looking for a missing person in the police files. Not this, not that; too dark, too old, too ginger, too young, too Spanish; no beard, nothing like Velázquez, nothing like Charles. Despondency (and relief) sets in. There are many hundreds of photographs and not a single one of them matches Snare’s description. There is no trace of his painting, or any other candidate for the lost Velázquez.
But there is something else. One of the green boxes bears an enticing label. “Charles I—Miscellaneous, Wrongly Named, Made Up.”
“Made Up” can mean entirely fantastical—the king out hunting for a unicorn—or just worked up from the imagination. The painter has never set eyes on his subject and is either trying to conjure a portrait out of an etching—putting flesh, as it were, on the bones of a drawing—or extrapolating from some earlier image. But there is a third, and more intriguing, way of making things up.
Van Dyck once painted a portrait of Charles I dictating dispatches to his secretary on the battlefield. The secretary is using a military drum for a desk, while the king is receiving a pen from his son. There is a photograph in the library boxes. And then there is another that looks exactly like the original, except that the drum is missing; and then another, now minus the secretary. The portrait is copied again and again by anonymous artists and each time something else changes: the pen becomes a pair of scissors, the scissors become a knife, which shrinks to a penknife and eventually disappears. There is even a version that omits the son, so that Charles is reaching pointlessly into thin air.
These copies were made to order. The proof is on the back of the photographs. “This portrait was made up for Sir H Grimston, based upon a head by Van Dyck.” “This painting”—of Charles with orb and scepter, a madly popular format—“is a combination of two full-length portraits, made specially for the owner of Kingston Lacy.”
Such fabrications are taken to a violent extreme when existing portraits are tailored to the buyer’s taste, an unlovely backdrop cut out, an extraneous hanger-on edited from the scene. Some portraits are even botched together out of more than one canvas: the stylish figure from a Mytens (master of textiles) topped with a Honthorst head. Most bizarre, and hilarious, is a hybrid in which a head based on a Van Dyck has been superimposed on a portrait of Charles’s nephew Carl Ludwig, th
e Elector of Palatine. The point of this project is not immediately obvious, although it does give the uncle some swanky new blue velvet clothes. Presumably it was made for an ardent royalist who wanted to recycle a serviceable Carl into a romantic new Charles, but the effect is perverse: the head doesn’t fit on the neck and, like Frankenstein’s creation, all the joins show.
Countless portraits have been customized down the centuries to satisfy their owners’ whims. Legs are cut off, faces—or hands, in the case of Archbishop Valdés—hacked out and framed by themselves. It happens to Velázquez as well as Van Dyck; those generational portraits of Philip IV, his parents, wife and son in the Buen Retiro, were pruned and bent to fit the architecture of the main hall: a family tree, as it were, ruthlessly espaliered in the artist’s own lifetime. His late portraits of the king’s daughters have grown larger—extra strips of canvas added so that the girls stood in grander royal spaces—just as they have shrunk, trimmed to give a greater focus to the face or figure to entice a potential suitor.
Snare’s portrait might have changed size or shape, like so many others. It might have acquired new elements or details. For there is another way to make up a painting, to fictionalize its appearance, and that is simply to take a brush and adapt the original.
The witnesses at the Edinburgh trial could not agree about whether the whole portrait had been painted at once, or whether some areas had been added later. Perhaps its style or identity was altered. We already know that this has happened to at least one Velázquez, the portrait in the Metropolitan Museum.
There may be no exact candidates for Velázquez’s Prince Charles in the library and there are none on the Web, that true infinity of faces, but there are two boxes of portraits by Van Dyck showing Charles I in armor. They are divided thus: “With baton in hand and the other or opposite elbow resting on a helmet”; and, more saliently, “With baton in hand, and the other or opposite elbow resting on a globe.”
This globe makes the world of difference, for it is extremely rare among the prolific portraits of Charles I. It is not a geographic globe, but a glass sphere, a mysterious and spectral object that has the appearance of a mirage or shadow. Van Dyck’s original was destroyed long ago, but a contemporary copy made in his studio exists, suggesting that it was in demand even at the time, so perhaps there were several others out there in the world. What if one of these was customized later on—the curtains, the distant scene?
Or what if some other portrait altogether had been overpainted with a ghostly sphere?
How cruel it seems even to suggest that the picture might have been a Van Dyck (or worse, a copy of a Van Dyck) adapted for someone’s private purposes; yet Snare thought along these lines himself. Writing about the red-and-yellow curtain that he believed to be emblematic of Spain’s national colors, he remarked, “The drapery can in one place be made out to have been laid on after the arm, which its folds partially conceal, was finished. These accessories were therefore an addition, introduced in compliance with some suggestion thrown out after the work had been in a great measure completed.”
This drapery is there for a reason, according to his self-fulfilling logic. The Spanish colors were irrelevant before Charles went to Spain, and irrelevant after the failed Match, ipso facto they must have been painted in Spain. (Perhaps they were added by one of the studio assistants, even Juan de Pareja.) Why else would there be Spanish colors?
One obvious answer is that the canvas might have been doctored to look like the great desideratum itself—the lost Charles by Velázquez. Another might be that the painting was actually Spanish, and showed a Spanish nobleman until someone gave him a new face and transformed him into an English prince.
The awful possibilities begin to ramify. It was a doctored copy of a Spanish portrait; it was a doctored copy of Van Dyck’s Charles with baton and sphere; it was something else altogether—the scarred and degraded relic of Snare’s dream, the Velázquez that never was.
• • •
I left the library downcast, and yet relieved. To see the portrait would have been to see Snare himself, to know the truth of them both. Now one part of his story could remain open.
For all those nineteenth-century people who did see the painting, and in some cases actually met the man, too, could not agree about the nature of either. To those who found it easy to sneer at this “amateur of pictures,” in Stirling Maxwell’s words, Snare was quite likely a shyster, relying upon the fact that nobody could prove, once and for all, that his picture was not a Velázquez.
A silver-tongued tradesman with a gift for publicity, as the Fine Arts Journal has it, he hustles for money, touring the Velázquez wherever he can, betting the business without a care for his family or staff. He is too pushy, talking up his picture at every opportunity, the printer forever printing the latest news of his treasure. He is obsessive, riding his hobby horse, as the Edinburgh lawyer had it, to the point of destruction. He can no longer see anything except his Velázquez, he loses all sense of the world. He is blind; he is mad.
For only a madman would refuse to sell the picture when the going was good. He could have taken Colonel Blagrave’s offer of £1,000 in 1847 and never found himself in trouble in Mayfair; in Mayfair, he could have accepted an offer from the Duke of Norfolk of £3,000 in 1849. What hubris it was to refuse, so says that former Minster Street employee in his letter to The New York Times in 1903; but it was only hubris if a bookseller was not allowed to own such a painting. Why would he—why would anyone—want to part with a Velázquez? Is there no conceivable world where art might come before money?
And then again, so many people believed that the portrait was by Velázquez during its brief visibility, from Miss Mitford to the collectors who tried to buy it in Reading and London; from the Count of Montemolin, who had grown up in the Spanish palaces surrounded by Velázquez’s works, to the painters, dealers and restorers at the Edinburgh trial; and the scores of writers and editors in the British and American press. It is a marvel to them all, the finest picture ever beheld, with its mother-of-pearl eyes and its wondrously spectral paint. There are the greys, greens and silvers of Velázquez’s paintings; there are the tones that seem to glow, mysteriously; there are the airy transitions and, above all, the old mystery of Velázquez’s art: how on earth has it been made?
Is it possible that the portrait had some genetic trace of Velázquez—that the miraculously fluent likeness so quickly made in Spain was brought home to England and laboriously overworked by other hands? Or was it another instance of that curious nineteenth-century phenomenon, a painting that has been altered, made up, transformed into some other painting?
If only there was a photograph of Snare’s portrait, we could see whether it carried something of Velázquez, or nothing at all. It would allow us to see what he saw, what he revered, above all what he truly loved—I believe in his sincerity—in this work of art that wrecked his life. If Snare had lived in another time, he would undoubtedly have sent a photograph and a copy of each of his pamphlets to the National Portrait Gallery library. But the library, in all its vastness, is necessarily limited. It opened its doors too late for John Snare.
• • •
The last thing I ever discovered about him was a tiny mention in a New York magazine in the late 1870s. He is to receive a diploma for drawing on glass. In his final years, Snare is studying to become an artist.
About the painting, the last thing I discovered was this. In all of his searches through the old documents and books, his fanatical investigations around Soho, his appeals to anyone ever likely to have encountered the painting, handled, cleaned or owned it, it never occurred to John Snare—or to anybody else in this tale—to look anywhere else for the lost portrait of Prince Charles. Snare did not do so, of course, because he believed he had it. But it turns out that others, especially those involved in the Edinburgh trial, had no such excuse.
Everyone believed that the portrait had once belonged to the 2nd Earl Fife—this was central to Snare’s
theories—so it was vital to establish the truth of the case. But the more I searched, the less likely it seemed; until one day I came upon a book by a Victorian poet that brought a bitter conclusion to one part of Snare’s story. For it turns out that the painting he bought that autumn day so long ago was not the curious portrait that once hung in Fife House in Whitehall. It never was the 2nd Earl Fife’s Velázquez, which is neither lost nor destroyed. That portrait still exists.
19
Lost and Found
DUFF HOUSE STANDS by the shores of the cold North Sea near Banff, solitary, remote and magnificently out of place, a Georgian palace beached in a seaside landscape. Bright waves are visible from the uppermost windows. It is the most isolated of all the grand designs dreamed up by the great Scottish architect William Adam, and might have been grander still if he hadn’t fallen out with his client, the 1st Earl Fife, over the cost of cutting limestone for two further wings.
This is where the 2nd Earl Fife was raised as a child, and where he later married unhappily—so unhappily that he and his wife, Dorothy, separated as soon as they could, though not before she had tried to kill him with a rifle in the Long Gallery. After the shooting, the building was partitioned so that husband and wife would no longer have to meet.
Duff House is where the earl kept good company with his guests, Edinburgh intellectuals and London politicians, and with the people who worked for him, too, the grieves and factors, foresters and plowmen who farmed the estate, the cooks and maids who ran the household during his long absences in London. The building was open to all-comers even while the earl was away, a tradition maintained long after his death. Which is how a Scottish poet on a walking tour of the neighborhood in the summer of 1843, happening to knock at the servants’ entrance, found himself warmly welcomed into Duff House.
The Vanishing Velázquez Page 24