In 1991, in Madrid, where she had fled to grieve the sudden death of her father, Laura Cumming stumbled upon Las Meninas, the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez’s renowned masterpiece in the Prado. The encounter, as she describes it, was an epiphany. Years later, by now the Observer’s art critic, she came upon a pamphlet written by a provincial Victorian tradesman, ominously named John Snare, who had been similarly enraptured by a now lost portrait by the artist of the English Prince Charles, which he had chanced to buy in 1845. But where for Cumming Velázquez’s revolutionary art, which places his 17th-century subjects vividly in our presence, had offered a kind of salvation, Snare’s passion became his doom.
Cumming’s ostensible subject is Velázquez: she summons him from the little we know, hurrying through the corridors of the Alcazar, an ambitious courtier as well as revered painter, presented to us for eternity in his self-portrait amid the royal household. But she also examines the artist who moves us. Cumming approaches her hero through that other vanishing man, Snare, who endured ridicule, harassment, bankruptcy, shame and ultimately exile, in his efforts to prove his painting’s attribution to the Spanish master. What is it, the book asks, that makes a Velázquez?
This book is a magnificent piece of historical research, the piecing together of Snare’s life story, while bringing alive both the Habsburg court and Victorian England’s murky art world. But it is also an eloquent defence of pure connoisseurship against dry contextual academicism—and a blazing display of passionate looking.
