posted on 10 Feb 2017

The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velazquez by Laura Cummings

Laura Cumming’s The Vanishing Man is really about three vanishing men: Velazquez, painter and courtier during the reign of King Philip IV of Spain; Charles I, whom Velazquez is said to have painted some time during 1623 when Charles – then Prince Charles – visited the Spanish court, the portrait having since been lost; and John Snare, an obscure Reading printer and bookseller who in 1845 thought he had purchased the lost portrait of Charles at a country house auction and who lost everything in his obsessive quest to establish the provenance of his painting.

That may sound too much for a single, relatively short book to contain, but Laura Cumming’s deft but iron control of these interwoven subjects never falters and what she produces from this complex story is a classic of popular art history which will surely be read for decades to come.

Snare ended his days shuffling ever further downwards through the cheap boarding tenements of Manhattan’s Broadway, periodically showing his portrait of Charles at a few cents a head. For a brief period he slept in an attic over an exhibition of ancient Egyptian artifacts for which he was promoter and doorman. But how did he come to leave – to abandon – his bankrupt family and children in Reading? Why was he hounded through the courts by the trustees of a Scottish earl who once claimed to have owned the painting he had purchased? Snare’s wife and all four of his children predeceased him, his family it seems as doomed and as short-lived as the ailing and inbred Spanish court, his family line disappearing as utterly as Velazquez’s portrait of Charles.

But the historical excavation of Snare’s bizarre life isn’t the book’s greatest achievement – though one imagines it may well have been the hardest. That claim goes, in my view, to Cumming’s extraordinary ability to continue to play out the various complex strands of narrative while at the same time exploring the mystery of Velazquez’s towering talent, the enigma of artistic creation, and the shadowy, disreputable almost fairground attraction atmosphere of the art-world as it existed in the centuries before museums and professionalised expertise and a global art market dominated by institutions, oligarchs, hedge funds and the hyper-rich.

The critical language Cumming creates to describe not just the paintings she considers but how the paint is laid on the canvas, how specific effects are achieved, is both beautiful and deeply informed – indeed, it is in these passages that her prose really catches fire. There were times, however, when I wished that the plates were better organised. I spent a lot of time flicking between passages of text and colour plates elsewhere in the book, but began to suspect that this may be deliberate: it seems to reinforce the message that for centuries art enthusiasts would often be forced to reckon with words alone, no printed image of a painting existing until such time as an engraver had been commissioned to produce a copy that could be reproduced.

I said at the opening of this piece that the book is really about three vanishing men. But it has only now struck me that this isn’t true. It is in fact about four vanishing men because somewhat like Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, Cumming’s book begins in grief following her father’s death. In grief she turns to art for consolation – and somehow (the process at times seems almost as magical as her subject’s painting) creates this deep, complex, exultant book.

Reading it, I began to understand for the first time how and why Velazquez painted the unknowns of Philip IV’s court – the dwarves and entertainers, the servants and maids, the mixers of pigment and stretchers of canvas; and how these people are able to gaze across four centuries with brimming self-awareness and dignity and apparent consciousness of us, their audience. In The Vanishing Man Cumming has created a love letter to Velazquez, a primer in how to better understand him and his work, and an impassioned lesson in looking at paintings. She has also written a deeply moving epitaph for her father. It’s a marvellous book. And in a period when there seems so little to celebrate, it is worth acknowledging that we are living in a golden age of non-fiction writing that breaks new ground.

 

Alun Severn

February 2017