The Vanishing Velázquez

by Laura Cumming

  Alexander Harper was following the River Deveron from its source to the sea, in the manner of Wordsworth and Coleridge walking the Lake District. He had the cunning idea of selling his romantic ballad—“Summer Excursions in the Neighbourhood of Banff, by a Deveronside Poet”—as a tourist handbook by other means, combining this long and elaborately rhetorical poem, which celebrates every species of flower and bird along the way, and practically every blade of grass, with a useful guide to the local monuments and, in particular, the paintings in Duff House. The volume is humbly dedicated to the current owner, the 4th Earl Fife.

  The housekeeper takes Harper’s coat and gives him a tour of the rooms. He sees paintings by Brueghel and Holbein, is moved by a Murillo saint, seduced by Joshua Reynolds’s flirtatious portrait of the beautiful actress Mrs. Abington, charmed by some cows drinking by a river, possibly Dutch. He is shown a head of Charles I, “exhibiting an indescribable look of majesty combined with melancholy.” It is the classic Van Dyck formula, and sure enough this is a genuine Van Dyck.

  Here are all the Tudor and Stuart portraits, here are the paintings of the Duke of Buckingham and his family, of Sir Kenelm Digby back from the Spanish Match, of the actor David Garrick in the role of Hamlet. At the top of the stairs Harper even encounters the portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots, admired by Thomas Pennant. In short, he sees the 2nd Earl’s collection of paintings just as he listed them, one by one, in his 1807 catalogue and just as they were sent up to Duff House after his death.

  And it is here, in a room off the vestibule, in the year 1843, that the poet comes face-to-face with the Fife Velázquez.

  The old housekeeper, who has been in charge since the turn of the century and has taken many a visitor around these crowded walls, has trouble with these Spanish names, pronouncing Murillo as Molière, but she tells the tale of Velázquez painting the prince’s portrait on the farcical trip to Madrid. Harper makes a note: “The portrait of Charles when a prince, said to have been made when he was in Spain, a suitor for the hand of the Infanta.”

  What he sees is a portrait of compelling intensity. There is no armor, no baton, no vague background scene, nothing to distract from the prince himself, dressed in brownish black, with “a singular look.” This is the painting mentioned in the letter to Pinkerton, the “curious portrait of Charles I, when Prince of Wales, painted by Valasky, at Madrid” (Plate K).

  It is exactly the right size, what is more: the three-quarters canvas of the 1807 catalogue. This is not John Snare’s painting at all; this is the 2nd Earl’s Velázquez, a painting not lost or stolen or surreptitiously abstracted, but hanging right here in Duff House, visible to wandering poets as late as 1843 when Harper published his book.

  It is just as well that Harper was so meticulous—his own catalogue of the paintings runs to reverential length—because his account of each painting and its exact position in Duff House precisely matches those of two writers who visited sixty years later. Both encountered the portrait of Charles when prince, painted by Velázquez, in the very same room off the vestibule. It had remained in exactly the same place in Duff House in the far north of Scotland from the 2nd Earl’s death all the way through the nineteenth century—long after the story of John Snare—right into the twentieth century.

  The writer K. Warren Clouston is visiting Duff House for The Connoisseur magazine in 1904. She gives a strong account of the architecture, as well as the famous visitors who have stayed here, including Dr. Johnson, James Boswell and Robert Burns, but her true interest is the art, in particular the Velázquez. She runs through the Spanish Match and Pacheco’s account of the picture and fervently agrees with the 2nd Earl’s belief that this is indeed the missing portrait:

  It represents him as fuller faced and more voluptuous looking than in his later pictures, when his vacillation and vicissitudes had left him thin and melancholy. However unfortunate he was in other respects, he was most fortunate in the artists whom he chose as his portrait painters, and whether we see him in the flush of youth, as in this stately portrait, or worn out by trouble, as he is represented by Van Dyck’s head in the Ante Drawing-Room, we shall be of this opinion.

  Katherine Warren Clouston died before completing her article. Her sister, M. Crosby Smith, revised the work and then published her own account of Duff House the following year. She describes the Velázquez as “the jewel of the collection” and “worth a king’s ransom.” It sounds like another strain of old art praise (albeit now informed by a sense of Velázquez’s market value) that tells us nothing about the portrait. But what makes these articles so significant is that there are not just words on the page, but reproductions, too.

  Here, at last, is the portrait.

  Charles is very close: so near his painter that one can easily imagine them breathing the same air. The picture is startlingly intimate. It shows a young man with girlish eyelashes and narrow shoulders, not quite at ease inside the stiff husk of his lavishly embroidered doublet, which seems slightly too large for his body.

  The same light that ignites this embroidery, twinkling across the golden threads, exposes the feint sheen of his high forehead. The nose is rounder than the elegant nib Van Dyck would give him, and his eyes have none of that melancholy, although they are heavy-lidded. His beard is new, a fledgling growth that doesn’t quite obscure the roundness of his chin, and his features are not fully formed, either. He is recognizably Charles, but you can still see traces of his father’s hollow eyes and his mother’s long face, as if he had not quite overcome his parents to become his own man. He appears in indeterminate space.

  The portrait is as precise as a snapshot, capturing the exact moment in the prince’s life between acquiring a beard and growing into the heir who will one day be king. Mrs. Clouston is right that he is fuller-faced, that he does not have the air of vicissitude one sees in the later paintings, or the hauteur of a king who believed in his divine right to rule, his royal prerogative to bypass Parliament whenever he wished, to levy taxes without anyone’s consent, to account for himself to God alone, in his notorious phrase, and who went to war with his own country.

  He is far nearer, here, to the young prince with the Scottish accent who was gauche and irresolute, according to those who knew him, and who would have to work hard to transform himself into the Cavalier with which his name and those of his supporters are associated. But nor is he quite the awkward boy with the downy upper lip who had set off for Spain with his father’s favorite courtier under a false name, poorly disguised, imagining that he might come back with a Spanish bride. The portrait shows the exact midpoint between these two periods, as if it might well have been painted in Spain; and there is more.

  Charles has a Spanish beard. He wears a Spanish collar. His brownish black dress is Spanish, remarkably like the dark doublets embroidered with metallic thread worn by the king in Velázquez’s portraits; indeed, it is almost identical to the costume in Philip IV in Brown and Silver in the National Gallery. It would be perfectly reasonable to imagine—to believe—that this portrait of Charles in Spanish costume, with Spanish beard, might have been painted in Madrid; and if so, who else could have painted it, and with such penetrating insight, if not Velázquez himself?

  It is not at all surprising that the 2nd Earl Fife believed he had Velázquez’s portrait of Prince Charles, nor that all the writers who saw it later thought the same thing. It is a tremendously sensitive and subtle painting, and it narrows the psychological distance between Charles and the viewer to such an extent that one feels his human presence before his royal status; the painting has profundity as a trait.

  But there was one more reason for these people to think the painting might be a Velázquez. The portrait they saw did not look as it does in this book. In those days it looked like this:

  This is the photograph that accompanies Mrs. Clouston’s article. There is no golden light, no background space; the painting is dark, the features are heavy and the hair is black as tar. Murkier still is the portrait in the phot
ograph that illustrates her sister’s article, which presents an even more degraded Charles.

  This image shows a canvas that has been almost poorly overpainted by some duffer with a brush, the hair a rigid black helmet, the beard sharpened and darkened, the eyebrows shaped as if plucked. The face is now a pale egg, defined by the dirty hair. Just like the man in the Metropolitan Museum, “improved” by order of Joseph Duveen, the portrait has been made to look more like someone’s idea of a Velázquez back in the eighteenth century. Charles has been Hispanicized.

  Mrs. Warren Clouston and Mrs. Crosby Smith were only just in time to see the portrait in Duff House. Its last owner, now styled the Duke of Fife, was running into financial difficulties and had to sell off as much property as he could. Many of the paintings were auctioned in 1907, and Duff House itself was sold. It became a palm-court hotel, which failed, then a sanitarium, which also failed. In the Second World War it was a billet for Polish soldiers and was unlucky enough to be bombarded by the Germans despite its extreme remoteness. And then it stood empty, its great roof derelict and its high windows shattered so that the sea air moved through the rooms where the paintings once hung. Nobody visited; there were no further sightings of the Velázquez.

  In 1963, after half a century of seclusion, it reappeared at a London auction, where it was sold to an anonymous collector. The portrait was cleaned, the layers of overpainting were removed and out of the darkness came the picture of today, far more penetrating and beautiful than it ever looked in the 2nd Earl’s time, but also bearing several marks that he was never able to see. One was the date, 1624; the other was a signature—that of the court painter Daniel Mytens.

  The earl loved this portrait, was fascinated by its strangeness and enthusiastically brought his visitors to see it; Thomas Pennant calls it curious, too. And so it is, with all its immediacy and insight, so clearly and closely painted from life, unlike a thousand other portraits of Charles. It stands alone in the crowd, a close-up, painted eye to eye and knee to knee almost; it shows the man before the prince. The earl did not stake his reputation on the painting. Would it have mattered so profoundly to him, as it did to John Snare, that his portrait was or was not a Velázquez?

  The earl was right in one surmise, however. The painting almost certainly belonged to the Duke of Buckingham, and was made especially for him. It has the intimate character of a friendship portrait and, sure enough, Mytens painted another of Buckingham for Charles in just the same pose (the royal accounts record the payment). And then he painted a third, of the diplomat Sir Endymion Porter, who was with them on the trip to Madrid—as if working up a Spanish Match series.

  • • •

  Daniel Mytens is an elusive painter, mysterious in his diversity. He was born in Delft, or The Hague, around 1590, nephew of one painter, brother of another, uncle of a third. No paintings survive before 1618, when he arrives in England and is hired by King James I. He is awarded an annual pension in 1624, and becomes “one of our picture-drawers for life” when Charles is crowned the following year (although that is not how his future turns out). He is also given the lease on a house with a walled garden in St. Martin’s Lane, just off Trafalgar Square, from which he can walk to Whitehall Palace or York House in a matter of minutes.

  Mytens painted so many full-length portraits of Charles that he must have needed assistants. He gets a pattern going, a look plus a stylish pose: curtain, window, pillar, hand on hip, king turning suavely to viewer in fabulous clothes. Charles in dove-grey velvet and taupe suede, in aubergine and gold stripes, in slashed scarlet with a watered silk sash; Mytens is a most perfect portrayer of garments, of laces and toggles, stomachers and collars, complex inner and outer sleeves. Two of his greatest portraits are of the same man, the Earl of Arran, in black silk with vermilion stockings at the age of seventeen and then again in a stupendous suit of silver six years later. Arran went to Madrid with Charles, another witness to the Spanish farce.

  But Mytens is a diffident painter, hesitant, gentle, perhaps lacking in a strong or resistant personality. He gives a soft grace to his people, and seems to find their hesitance, too. There is no sense of an equal tension between artist and sitter, as there is with Velázquez and Van Dyck. He cannot quite rise to the challenge of Charles in the big formal pictures, cannot project enough character anywhere but here, in this unique friendship portrait.

  Mytens sees clearly, paints gracefully, is patient and forgiving, but also anxious. All of these traits are present in his own self-portrait, which hangs in a long crepuscular corridor in the queen’s private apartments at Windsor Castle. There he is among the swaggering Van Dycks, making eye contact without wishing to appear too forward, his starched collar beginning to flag, a shy man in alien surroundings. There is a truthfulness here, a freedom and an understanding of the inner man that makes his self-portrait—as so often in art—one of his strongest paintings.

  Many foreign artists worked at the court of Charles I, from Mytens and Honthorst to Jonson and Gentileschi and eventually, from 1632, Van Dyck. What these painters have in common is their internationalism, their knowledge of elsewhere and of other styles of art; but they have their isolation and vulnerability, too. It only takes someone better to arrive from somewhere else and a painter’s days may be numbered.

  Van Dyck included Mytens in a series of court portraits, but this doesn’t make them friends. And Mytens was very soon sidelined. His tasks were reduced and in the final humiliation he was required to repaint one of his own royal portraits in the manner of the new Flemish star.

  Sometime between 1633 and 1634 he left London for The Hague and never returned. Nobody knows when he died or where he is buried. Mytens is not the subject of a monograph; his paintings are not reproduced as postcards; his name is all but extinguished. But the friendship portrait of Prince Charles is an exceptional work: the young prince so close and alone, surrounded by nothing but glowing air. Mytens had never painted anything like it before.

  Earlier in 1623 Mytens was commissioned to paint a portrait of Prince Charles as an act of pictorial diplomacy with Spain. It was dispatched to the Alcázar, where Velázquez must have seen it. It is at least conceivable that the same thing happened in London: that Mytens saw Velázquez’s portrait, too, before it vanished. Could he—could this portrait—have absorbed something from Velázquez?

  • • •

  The 2nd Earl Fife did not live to learn that his Velázquez was in fact a Mytens; John Snare did not live to learn that his Velázquez never belonged to the earl. This is a mercy in both cases, but the aristocrat was luckier than the tradesman because he lost nothing by his portrait, whereas Snare’s life was set towards disaster at Radley Hall. He spent his life trying to establish a definitive history and pedigree for the painting based upon a false premise. Stirling Maxwell said that Snare had proved very little except that the portrait might once have belonged to the 2nd Earl Fife. And now this possibility is canceled, too, simply because we are able to see what they never could; because we can look at photographs, compare color reproductions and magnify them down to the last whisker; because we can search through letters, inventories and memoirs in libraries all over the world, or shake the Internet until it bears fruit. We do not know better than these people of the past, we just know more than they could.

  Alexander Harper’s book was published in a tiny local edition two years before Snare ever went to Radley Hall. If he had heard of it, if he had read it, his life might have taken a better course. “Summer Excursions” is the letter that slipped beneath the carpet.

  But that is to blame everything on chance or coincidence. If Snare had heard of Harper, if Harper had ever achieved the popular reach he hoped for, then everything might have been different. Whereas the onus is surely upon several other people: the executors of the 2nd Earl Fife, who might have taken the trouble to check the whereabouts of his paintings, who might have sent inquiries to Duff House, who might at the very least have consulted the 4th Earl before they brought so muc
h grief to Snare (and how about the earl himself?). They simply decided to take Snare at his word, to believe he had the painting and casually—or maliciously—accuse him of handling stolen goods.

  What the Trustees had, and what still exists, is of course the 1807 catalogue. They might have matched it to the paintings in Duff House. One of them might have made the journey and looked with his own eyes; one of them might have troubled to consult the staff. For the housekeeper of that Georgian house by the sea knew which portrait was which, enough to guide Alexander Harper straight to “the Velázquez.”

  As for the old retainers from Fife House in Whitehall who thought that John Snare’s painting had once hung there, there is a possible explanation for their belief. Among the paintings sold by the Duke of Fife in 1907 were several works by Van Dyck that had once been in Fife House. Three are portraits of Charles I. One of them is described as a painting of the king in armor, standing, with a lace collar and a baton. Now imagine it veiled with dirt.

  • • •

  The 2nd Earl Fife’s collection is entirely dispersed. Mytens’s portraits of Charles, many of which were made for foreign courts in the first place, for diplomats, aristocrats and monarchs, have wandered all over the world, to Denmark and Canada, Spain and the Czech Republic. The beautiful portrait of Prince Charles with his new Spanish beard has gone abroad, too, from Duff House to England, then Italy, where it was cleaned. It is now in a private collection in America. But in this great flux of paintings moving around the world, tumbling in the tide of history, where is the picture the 2nd Earl Fife believed he owned, the picture John Snare thought he had bought, the picture first mentioned by Pacheco nearly four centuries ago—where is the lost portrait of Charles by Velázquez?