Things were not going well in Madrid. Prince Charles and the Duke of Buckingham had conspired to travel in disguise to Spain and somehow wed the Protestant Charles to the Roman Catholic Maria Anna, the Spanish king’s sister, and in so doing put an end to centuries of tension between the two countries.
Unsurprisingly, the scheme failed in miserable fashion: seasickness, blown disguises, livestock theft, fights with locals—and that’s before the two even arrived in March 1623, without prior notice, to the most formal court in Europe. Once there, Buckingham’s behavior revolted the Spanish—everything from putting his feet up on the royal furniture to carousing with prostitutes—and the plan was further encumbered by ecclesiastical differences. It was late that August that Velázquez painted the 22-year-old English prince.
That painting is the titular work of Laura Cumming’s fascinating book. The Vanishing Velázquez is a double portrait, an account of the life and art of that greatest of Spanish painters, Diego Velázquez, and an exhumation of a forgotten art-loving bookseller, John Snare. Even more, it is a beautiful study in extremes: in the case of the artist, of a talent so astounding that Manet called him “the greatest painter there ever was,” and in the case of the merchant, of a passion (or obsession, depending on your perspective) so intense that its pursuit would drive him to ruin.
Cumming tells Velázquez’s story through his paintings. A reserved output—he made not more than 120 pieces over a 40-year career—his art is still the easiest route into the life of a mysterious man. The author offers a few of his best-known canvases—including the early Water Carrier of Seville, his portrait of Pope Innocent X, the famed Las Meninas—to argue for an artist most notable for a gaze both penetrating and egalitarian.
In the work of Velázquez, we connect with his subjects on an almost uncomfortably acute level. According to Cumming, many of his paintings have “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.” We are in Velázquez’s shoes, seeing the sitter as he saw them, and being seen in return. The result is work that Cumming calls “deeply and radically human. . . . All people are equal in the art of Velázquez. . . . His paintings make small people large, and large people tiny.”
Neither this optical ménage à trois among viewer, artist, and subject nor the democratic nature of Velázquez is an idea unique to Laura Cumming, but they bear repeating. Similarly, her admiration of the painter can extend into the realm of hagiography; but if not Velázquez, then who warrants such praise? These are minor complaints in an engaging, if brief, summary of a true master. But the real meat of the book, and what will keep readers turning pages, is the story of that 19th-century bookseller.
When a boarding school near Oxford shuttered and auctioned off its possessions, there was one item for sale that John Snare was particularly interested in. An October 1845 notice in the local paper mentions it: “A Half-Length of Charles the First (supposed Van-dyke).”
Cumming explains that Snare “seems to have had a sixth sense about the painting.” At the preview, he inspected the portrait, so darkened with age that the ill-fated prince’s features were scarcely visible, and did something unthinkable in today’s art world: He wet his finger and rubbed it against the canvas. But what would be a great transgression in any modern auction house proved a revelation for Snare. “I can never forget the impression,” he later wrote, “as the tones came alive like magic.” He believed not only that the catalogue was wrong about the painting’s authorship but that the portrait was the rare work of an artist whose fame was growing in England: Velázquez.
Snare kept this belief to himself—in his words, “half ashamed of my own thoughts, and afraid lest I should be mocked”—but returned the day of the auction determined to win the treasure. When the hammer came down, the bookseller had captured his prize for a mere £8. Painting in hand, Snare set about the Sisyphean task that would consume the rest of his life: proving that his Charles was a genuine Velázquez.
The burning question was how a work created in Madrid for a prince in 1623 could find its way to the back room of a provincial English bookseller’s shop two centuries later. This, indeed, was the quandary that vexed Snare, and Cumming does an excellent job explaining the challenges facing him, retracing his attempts to document the painting’s history.
Snare found evidence supporting his hunch in a memoir by the painter’s father-in-law; a record in the royal accounts; a travel guide stocked in his shop; a catalogue of art hanging in Fife House in Whitehall. Finally, Snare worked up the courage to exhibit his resuscitated Velázquez in a one-work show in London in 1847. The reviews were glowing and the crowds poured in, including the Duke of Wellington, who visited twice.
But this is where Snare’s story takes a turn for the worse. The work found detractors, who attacked both the painting and its owner. Who is this country bumpkin who thinks he is able to see what so many in the art world cannot? Is this even a real Velázquez? Snare fired back with a pamphlet outlining his case for the work’s authenticity.
Even more disastrous, the man whose space he had been renting to show the painting had debts, and the mortgage-holders stole the portrait to use as leverage for payment. Snare shelled out the then-massive amount of £400 to settle the renter’s balance and reclaim the work.
Sadly, this was just the beginning of his woes. In 1849 he took the painting to Edinburgh for the first stop of what was supposed to be a tour of Great Britain. Things went much as they did in London: strong reviews, eager crowds, then a seizure. At the beginning of the third week of the show, police descended on the exhibition and confiscated the painting as stolen property, claiming it had been filched at some unknown time from the trustees of the 2nd Earl Fife. The law was on Snare’s side, but the trustees used their power to delay resolution.
Meanwhile, Snare’s economic well-being deteriorated to the point of insolvency. His dedication to the Charles had led him to neglect the book business. His finances dwindled, and creditors arrived on his own threshold. He went bankrupt—and all his worldly possessions, down to the doorknobs on his shop, were auctioned off to settle his arrears.
The painting was finally restored to Snare, but his life was in ruins and he became a pariah because of the theft allegations. As with the attacks launched on the portrait in London, he fought back—but this time with litigation. He brought the Fife Trustees to court to account for the fraudulent seizure that had put his painting’s tour on hold and sullied his name.
A protracted case ensued, and the question of Snare’s compensation turned on the authenticity of his painting. If it were a real Velázquez, his claims of ruinous losses would be substantiated; if it were a worthless piece of aesthetic flotsam, he would be owed little. So how did the trial end? What was the fate of Snare and his livelihood? What became of his treasured portrait? These are questions not to be spoiled here, but whose resolution, if one can call it that, includes a sojourn in America, a reunion with a long lost son, and a famous museum on Fifth Avenue.
The Vanishing Velázquez raises far more questions than it answers. But it also captures the inimitability of two different men in much the same way that Velázquez captured his subjects. This is a sketch of a talented artist’s keen eye for the inner nature of his sitters and a humble bookseller’s unparalleled passion for a work of art. And just as a portrait can carry its subject into the future, Laura Cumming has given the story of John Snare and his lost Velázquez a new life.
Brian P. Kelly is the assistant Arts in Review editor of the Wall Street Journal. He is on Twitter.
