The Vanishing Man by Laura Cumming
Chatto and Windus, £19
Laura Cumming, art critic of The Observer, has written a book full of interest and passion. The interest comes from the art world between the 17th and 19th century: a place full of neglected old masters, lost paintings, the art trade, auctions and aristocratic wills. The passion comes from her love and knowledge of art, in particular that of the great Spanish painter, Velázquez. Without ignoring scholarship, she has succeeded in bringing Velázquez’s paintings to life by her vivid evocation of them – especially the mysterious Las Meninas (1656).
Visiting Madrid’s Prado museum to distract herself from the sorrow of her father’s death, Cumming muses on the solace conveyed by Velázquez’s art: “There seems to be some collective recoil from the idea that art might actually overwhelm, distress or enchant us … that it might raise us up as a Shakespearean tragedy raises its audience.”
Like Shakespeare, about whose life we know so little, Velázquez seems a “vanishing man”: courtly, reserved and a painter whose humane, inclusive vision of other human beings invested tradesmen and the dwarfs employed at the Hapsburg court of Spain with as much dignity and soulfulness as his portraits of Philip IV himself.
Alongside the life of the painter, Cumming interweaves another story: that of a modest bookseller in Reading, John Snare, who purchased a painting of a young man for eight pounds at auction at Radley Hall, Oxfordshire, in 1845 and became convinced that it was a lost Velázquez portrait of the young Prince Charles, later Charles I, who had visited Spain in 1623 and whose portrait had indeed been painted by the leading court artist. That painting, later lost for good, was to prove the ruin of its owner.
Cumming’s sympathy for his plight and her understanding of his reverence for Velázquez gives Snare his own unlikely immortality in these pages. Above all, the book reminds us that great art cannot be explained – it is impossible to pinpoint “the precise moment where the chaos of brush marks in a Velázquez somehow coalesces into an image”.
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