Art legend who ruined a decent bookseller
(and the poor art dealer ruined by his chance discovery of a lost masterpiece )
Some years ago, following the death of her father, Laura Cumming took off for Madrid, in what she now calls ‘my raging grief ’. ‘I went to Madrid in a bitter midwinter, a city chosen because neither he nor I had ever been there and I couldn’t speak the language. There would be no old associations and no new conversations: time could stand still while I thought about nothing and no one but him.’
For some time, she avoided going into the Prado Museum, the great jewel in the crown of Spain and home to an unparalleled collection of paintings. But, one day, she succumbed, and looking for El Greco, one of her father’s favourite painters, she peered through a doorway and saw several pairs of eyes staring back at her, including those of a female dwarf, a royal princess and an artist.
‘You are here, you have appeared: that is the split-second revelation in their eyes, all these people looking back at you from the other side of the room... you have walked into their world and become suddenly as present to them as they are to you.’
Anyone who has been to the Prado and set eyes on Velázquez’s vast, life-size group portrait Las Meninas (The Maids Of Honour) will recognise this mystical sensation. Like all great art, it is like life but more so. ‘Velázquez is able to make you, and all before and after you, feel as alive to these people as they are to you; everyone sees, everyone is seen... The whole surface of Las Meninas feels alive to our presence.’
Through the contemplation of the 12 figures in the group – one of them a dog – in a picture painted 450 years ago, Cumming began to come to terms with mortality. ‘Because of Velázquez, these longlost people will always be there at the heart of the Prado, always waiting for us to arrive; they will never go away, as long as we are there to hold them in sight... The gratitude I feel to Velázquez for this greatest of painting is untold; he gave me the consolation to return to my own life.’
As you can see, Cumming is not like other art critics. Not for her the retreat behind the screen of art history, nor the cloudy abstractions of academia. Though great paintings have the power and immediacy of a world illuminated by flashes of lightning, most art criticism reads as if written in a fuggy library, with the shutters drawn and the lights dimmed. ‘There seems to be some collective recoil from the idea that art might actually overwhelm, distress or enchant us, might inspire wonder, anger, compassion or tears,’ observes Cumming.
In her last book, a mesmerising study of the self-portrait called A Face To The World, she devoted a whole chapter to Las Meninas. Though she didn’t then reveal its deeper personal significance, she made a characteristically bold attempt to capture its immediate effect on the viewer: ‘You could stop there, stunned, at a distance. Many people do, struck by those people assembled like the guests at a surprise party who are trying to keep still and silent in advance of your arrival.’
Little is known about Velázquez the man. He left no writing, and none of his contemporaries kept any record of a conversation with him. We know that, as a young man, he won a contest to become the painter to the court of King Philip IV of Spain. We know details of where he lived and what he earned. We know, through anecdote, the electrifying effect of his paintings on the royal court: how, at dusk, King Philip mistook one for a real courtier and rebuked it, saying: ‘What, are you still here?’ But of the man himself we know next to nothing. He is The Vanishing Man of the book’s title.
Or, at least, one of them. Another is John Snare, an obscure book dealer from Reading, all but lost to history and destined, in Cumming’s words, ‘to remain forever in the shadows’.
Snare went to a country house auction in 1845 and successfully bid just £8 for a grubby old painting, vaguely attributed to Van Dyck. That evening, he began to clean it with a sponge and turpentine, and the beauty of the painting shone through. ‘I started from my chair and ran to fetch my wife and show her the treasure I possessed... I was alive with exultation.’
The remaining 40 years of Snare’s life were sacrificed to his single-minded love of this painting, and to his burning conviction that it was a Velázquez portrait of the young King Charles I of England. Unfairly hounded and driven to bankruptcy by trustees of a Scottish estate who claimed it had been stolen, Snare lost his shop, his livelihood and his family, but always held on to the painting that had brought about his ruin.
Cumming alternates the tale of the mighty genius Velázquez with that of his doomed fan, the increasingly woebegone John Snare, several centuries later. Snare himself might have sprung from a Victorian melodrama, a warning against the perils of obsession. Exhibited in Edinburgh, the painting is impounded by the courts, and poor Snare is forced to fight an interminable series of cases to prove the
‘Velázquez is able to make you, and all before you, feel as alive to these people as they are to you’
A fascinating tale of two art lovers: one, the enigmatic Spanish painter Velázquez – and two, the book dealer who bought one of his works for £8... bringing him misery, not riches
masterpiece is rightly his. He eventually proves his point, but the mud slung by his opponents sticks, and his regular customers desert him, believing him to be a thief.
Bankruptcy follows and his bookshop is sold, along with the blinds, the counters and the shelves. Snare then claims for damages against those who have ruined him and embarks on yet another convoluted court case, this time with the opposing trustees going into reverse, and struggling to prove that the painting in question is just a worthless imitation.
By now, Snare has fled with the painting to New York, leaving his wife and children behind, never to set eyes on him again. He dies at some point in the 1890s and lies buried in an unmarked grave. Just as mysteriously, the painting also disappears, though Cumming’s own dogged researches deliver a final sting in the tale.
As so often happens in books in which two stories from different eras are intertwined, one proves much more compelling than the other. The case of Snare is interesting, but perhaps not quite as interesting as Cumming wants it to be. Apart from his fanatical attachment to the painting he acquired at auction, Snare’s character and motivations are lost to time, leaving everything open to question.
Because Cumming is such an honest writer, she refuses to dissemble, and that irritating little word ‘perhaps’ keeps sticking its nose in. What of his life in Manhattan, for instance, where he lived for 30 years? Did he keep in touch with his family back in England? Did he miss them? ‘Perhaps life was good, and he was free; or perhaps he was desperately trying to make ends meet, sending whatever money he could make home to England.’
Perhaps, perhaps... our knowledge of the life of Velázquez, the other Vanished Man, is also ruled by gaps, but they are gaps that serve to echo and enhance the enigma of his genius, or what Cumming describes, perfectly, as ‘the sense of... a man in the corner of the gathering, watching and observing, saying nothing although he understands all’.
Would we be better off knowing what Velázquez thought of his neighbours, or what his hobbies were, or his favourite food? Of course not. The same goes for his art. When the works of other painters are subjected to X-ray, all sorts of preliminary sketches and false-starts are revealed, but X-rays of Velázquez’s work reveal nothing below: he painted straight on to canvas, like a magician. He could, in Cumming’s words, ‘lay paint on canvas so that it is as impalpable as breath’.
But Snare was no genius, so our ignorance of his life does not elevate its mystery. In fact, it has no plus side: it just leaves us with no understanding of what made him tick. His is a shaggy-dog tale leading to nowhere. Nevertheless, it is a tribute to Cumming’s beady brilliance that her book remains so compelling, a tribute to three Vanishing Men, the last being her own beloved father.
‘The dead are with us,’ she concludes, ‘and so are the living consoled. We live in each other’s eyes and our stories need not end.’