A cultural whodunnit
The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez by Laura Cumming
Chatto & Windus £18.99
Oldie price £16.99 (+p&p). Call 01326 555 762 to order
HISTORY IS a mass grave for vanished masterpieces and every collector nurses a fantasy that one day, they will dig one up. One day they’ll be rooting about in a junk shop, and there it will be, stacked among the mouse-nibbled prints with its face turned away – the Mantegna panel, the Constable cloudscape. The lost Holbein of Anne Boleyn!
Be careful what you wish for, is the moral of Laura Cumming’s hauntingly good and interesting book. Here she tells the story of John Snare, bookseller, printseller and printmaker of Reading. In 1845 he attended an auction of property belonging to a defunct boarding school, and there he spied a painting that his instinct told him was the lost Velázquez portrait of the young Prince of Wales, later Charles I, made when Charles went a-wooing in Spain in 1623.
The lot went to Snare. Then he went home, never guessing the auctioneer’s gavel had sounded the crack of doom, and that the painting would possess his whole existence. He had no pecuniary motive for this. The book wouldn’t be half as engaging if he were trying to turn a profit rather than show an undeserving world what the picture – and hence his own powers of discernment and research – was really made of. He is very clear on this point: ‘The picture is not for sale’, he wrote, with a stiffness of neck that characterised his general proceedings, ‘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.’
As Cumming reminds us, only the possessed would embark on such an enterprise. Research into this picture was almost impossible for a Victorian of modest means and no history of Spanish travel. This was a time when almost all old paintings were in private hands and the public gallery was in its infancy. Most reproductions were bad prints, often taken from bad copies of the original. A researcher’s main resource would be the verbal descriptions of paintings left by returning travellers. As for Velázquez: ‘Some people knew Velázquez chiefly as a painter of dogs,’ says Cumming.
Soon the painting’s reputation grew too big for the bookshop. Emboldened by the admiration of what passed for experts, he put it on display in a rented Bond Street gallery, accompanied by his own explanatory booklet, The History and Pedigree of The Portrait of Prince Charles; and it was this forgotten polemic that surfaced one day when Laura Cumming was in the library looking for something else. As with Snare at the auction, so with Cumming in the library: she recognised a potential gem.
The opportunity is not wasted on her. What we have here is a portrait of the unhappy Snare in the downward spiral of his obsession, with Cumming, who really wants him to be right, on his heels. But she’s now chasing a double scent. She follows Snare on his lonely road from Reading to Calvary, via Edinburgh – and a calamitous run-in with the piratical trustees of the Earl Fife – and the tenements of 19th-century New York. But she’s also tracing the picture back to its origins at the court of Philip IV. That means giving us what is known of Velázquez’s life, and doing for Snare what he couldn’t do for himself: looking at the paintings.
To interleave Snare’s story with a biography and critique of the artist might sound like a way of padding out an arthistorical curiosity into something of book size. This unworthy thought passed through my own mind; but it is far from the case. Not only are the biographical passages admirable in themselves, but the book is so carefully made that each part seems to reflect and light up the rest. So when she meditates upon Velázquez’s incoherent ‘salad’ of brushstrokes, which resolve into pictorial truth as you walk away, it illuminates the nature of her pursuit: how a dispersed litter of documentation can suddenly cohere into biographical insight (or a pictorial attribution, come to that).
In particular, she writes well about Velázquez’s levelling humanity. He was painter to the most formal and socially stratified court the world has known, yet his dwarfs are as solemn as his Kings, his Kings as sad as his dwarfs. As she says, ‘He puts his art to the deepest human purpose.’ In Snare’s lifetime, the episode of this ‘Velasco Prince Charles’ struck the public as a comedy of proportion: the joke was in the gap between the littleness of the man and the greatness of his painting, or his claims for it. Following Velázquez’s lead, Cumming wraps Snare in a mantle of dignity – albeit one he sometimes threatens to burst out of. She will not have him mocked.
The question at the centre of The Vanishing Man – who painted the picture, and where is it now? – isn’t one to be answered in a book review. Suffice it to say that this is a cultural whodunnit, and the skill is in making the pursuit as engaging as the dénouement.