The Vanishing Velázquez by Laura Cumming - Scribner (2016)
The Vanishing Velázquez by Laura Cumming is, structurally speaking, one of the most innovative biographies I’ve ever read. In fact, I think ‘dual biography’ is probably a more appropriate term for this phenomenal text, as Cumming divides her attentions equally between two men who lived centuries—and worlds—apart. The first man will be easily recognizable to anyone who has ever studied the great masters of European painting. He is the esteemed Diego Velázquez, whose piercing portraits of Spanish nobles captured the melancholy twilight of a dynasty in decline. The second man will be recognizable to no one. He is John Snare, a nineteenth-century bookseller whose fascination with a single painting precipitated the spectacular ruin of his own reputation, business, and marriage. Having dedicated his life to the impassioned defense of a painting he knew in his heart to be a genuine Velázquez, after combing through the archives and chasing down every fragile lead, John Snare found himself spending his ‘golden’ years in relative anonymity, alone and impoverished in New York City, discredited by most experts in the field of fine arts and wanted by the Scottish authorities. His life is the nonfiction rendition of The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. In the tragic figure of John Snare, Laura Cumming erects a monument to irrational obsession, material greed, and, ultimately, the supernatural power contained within a beautiful piece of art. One can visualize Snare as an elderly man, alone in his tiny dilapidated apartment on Broadway, holed up with his treasured painting and little else. After spending the first half of his life carefully establishing himself in the close-knit community of Reading, Snare died a slavish, Gollum-like creature, having lost his soul in the alluring painted gaze of the doomed Charles I of England. The inevitable fall began, as Cumming suggests, the moment Snare followed a whim to an obscure little auction and chanced to glance behind the filthy surface of a forgotten canvas. Fate looms large in the history of art, in the vaulted halls of our greatest museums, and in every chapter of The Vanishing Velázquez. Writes Cumming:
For two centuries and more it has been confidently predicted that the small sum of Velázquez’s art would never increase, that no more paintings by him would now be found, that any lost paintings were permanently lost. But this has never been true. His pictures really have turned up again, tumbled in the tide of history, one by one, discovered in the most unlikely places…For Velázquez’s portraits, so miraculously empathetic and precise, so unmistakable and inimitable, as it seems, keep on being mistaken and overlooked. Perhaps something in his exceptionally enigmatic way of painting has veiled these works; something in their mystery and modesty—from the self-effacing brushwork to the absence of a signature—has obscured them. They depend upon the kindness of strangers to an unusual degree; they need people to find and to save them.
The fact that a middling merchant of no great worth happened to be one of these ‘saviors’ is further evidence of fate’s naughty disposition. When I think about all the times I have walked by framed portraits in thrift shops without a second glance, it makes John Snare’s perseverance all the more impressive. It can be difficult, after all, to trust the authenticity of a work of art that hasn’t been given the curator’s seal of approval. Uneducated as he might have been in the history and composition of fine art, John Snare’s eye was discerning enough to rummage through a collection of soiled and neglected doodles and pick out a masterpiece. Or so he would claim as he spent the remainder of his life defending ‘his picture.’ The portrait having since mysteriously disappeared once again, neither Cumming nor her readers can make any headway in determining whether or not Snare actually possessed a genuine Velázquez. But that is beside the point. The point is Snare’s singular devotion, which reads rather like a Tolstoy love story. Writes Cumming:
We say that works of art can change our lives, an optimistic piety that generally refers to the moral or spiritual uplift of painting, and the way it may improve its audience. But art has other powers to alter our existence. The moment he bought the portrait of Prince Charles, Snare’s life changed direction. It was a lost work, disregarded, on its way to the oblivion from which he saved it in 1845. It was an object that he would be forced to defend from danger and theft, that took him from small-town provincial life to the most fashionable streets of London and New York, and from obscurity to newspaper fame; a painting he would take with him wherever he went, that came to mean more to him than anything in the world, more than his family, his home, and himself, that would lead to exile, a lonely death in a cold-water tenement and an unmarked grave in New York: the painting that would ruin his life.
Cumming is a master of nonfiction ‘storytelling.’ Part of the reason her book is so easy to read—and so lauded by critics—is because it contains all the decadence and decay of a Victorian novel. John Snare finds himself drawn into the glittering world of transient wealth just like Dorian Gray and Jay Gatsby. Like Theodore Decker and his painted finch, by the time John Snare realizes the price of his obsession, he is already estranged from the ordinary life he might once have led. Falling in love with a work of art is ultimately a lonely experience because it happens so rarely and is not easily understood by those who have never swooned over brushstrokes. Cumming bridges the gulf by writing about Velázquez’s style in almost erotic terms. By doing so, she encourages readers to identify with Snare’s feelings, even if the object of desire remains intangible. Writes Cumming:
Everything he did was original, and in every genre. His landscapes are unprecedented; his still lifes almost sacramental; his fables are real and human. He invented a new kind of pictorial space and a new kind of picture in which consciousness flows in both directions. His portraits are not just the living, breathing likeness, but the seeing, feeling being in the very moment of life and thought, Nobody has ever surpassed his way of making pictures that seem to represent the experience—the immediacy—of seeing in themselves. He is the taciturn revolutionary among them all.
This description of a style of painting is almost hot-and-heavy. Through her heightened vocabulary and the rapid, tumbling urgency of her sentences, Cumming comes across just as enamored as Snare must have been. This is not entirely surprising—Cumming is a notable art critic and wrote an equally breathless book on self-portraits in 2009. The means by which a single annotated fragment in a dusty record caught her attention and dragged her off on the same hopeless mission as John Snare himself is a testament to the allure of Velázquez. In fact, Cumming found herself following in the literal footsteps of Snare in her pursuit of the lost painting, coming up against the same obstacles and frustrations, unearthing the same hilariously-named participants like characters out of Beatrix Potter, traveling great distances to interview senile eyewitnesses, and ending up with the same unanswered questions and the realization that she will likely never know the truth about the vanished masterpiece. Part of the anxiety felt by Cumming, Snare, and modern readers alike, has to do with the desire to see something that survives only in description. The limitations of words in the communication of art is an underlying theme trickling quietly beneath Cumming’s narrative, and it is what makes her writing both entertaining and frustratingly inconclusive.
Velázquez is known in the art world for his ability to draw observers into the scenes he depicts. Thus, the relationship between inanimate painting and animate human being is more reciprocal than in most situations. In fact, Cumming might argue that Velázquez’s best canvases engage in a certain amount of seduction.The artist,
…invents a new kind of art: the painting as living theater, a performance that extends out into our world and gives a part to each and every one of us, embracing every single viewer. For anyone who stands before Las Meninas now, held fast by the eyes of these lost children and servants, is positioned exactly where the people of the past once stood. This is part of the picture’s content. It elects you to the company of all who have ever seen it, from the little princess and her maids, who must have rushed around to see themselves the moment Velázquez finished, to the king and queen who appear in miniature in that glimmering mirror at the back…The picture turns the world upside down, so that citizens may take the place of kings, and kings may be tiny compared to children.
Can John Snare be blamed for his downfall? Laura Cumming seems to think that falling in love is inevitable for anyone who stands before a genuine Velázquez. The Spanish master was just that good. It is impressive that Cumming’s biography remains so balanced even while one of her protagonists soars towards the heavens of artistic immortality, and the other plummets into obscurity. Their narrative trajectories may spin off in opposite directions, but the reader feels for and appreciates both untouchable Velázquez and forgettable John Snare. This is, perhaps, Cumming’s greatest accomplishment in The Vanishing Velázquez.
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