We live in an age of wonders. This afternoon, if I so chose, I could get on the bus and the Metro and within an hour be standing in front of Las Meninas, the masterpiece of the transcendent Spanish painter Diego Velázquez.
I don't have time though as I'm writing this so instead I typed Las Meninas into Chrome, and looked at a digital representation of the canvass. If I wanted to look at it more often I can install it on my television screen for when I need relief from Babylon Berlin.
We, with our internet and our Ryanairs and Metros, take these things for granted, but they are modern miracles. From 1656 when it was painted until 1819 when the Prado opened, viewing Las Meninas was essentially restricted to the Princes and flunkeys of the Spanish court.
Even in the nineteenth century, you still needed to be able to get to Madrid to see the painting and you really had to want to come. Edouard Manet, the French modernist, did and in 1865 braved a cholera outbreak and a 36 hour train journey to make a pilgrimage to see the work of Velázquez. He didn’t much like Madrid, finding the food bad and life uncomfortable. But he loved the work of Velázquez, telling Baudelaire he was ‘the greatest painter there ever was’.
This story is just one of many in The Vanishing Man – In Pursuit of Velázquez, Laura Cumming’s thrilling book which tells the story of Velázquez himself and the tale of a 19th Century Reading shopkeeper and his fight to prove he owned a lost work of the great master.
The Vanishing Man is an incredible feat of story-telling. It is entertaining, compelling and rich in detail, and Cumming writes beautifully about a subject that feels intensely personal to her. What is extraordinary, however, is the research and how the author has been able to do so much with so little. Hardly anything is known about the life of Velázquez. Contemporary accounts of his life are few, short and frustratingly lacking in detail, particularly around his motivations and views. Historical record is largely related to his role as courtesan rather than painter.
And so Cumming painstakingly pieces together an impression of him through the interpretation of his art and the information that does exist. Her frustration at this lack of knowledge screams from every page. There´s a sense that she would give a great deal for just an hour in his company.
More is known of John Snare, the Reading stationer, who bought a portrait of Prince Charles from a country house sale in Radley in 1845 believing it was by the Spanish master when everyone else thought it was a Van Dyck. Snare’s story is quite something also, his obsession with the painting taking him from Reading to Edinburgh and then New York and all but breaking him.
I can’t recommend the book highly enough, for its passion and emotion, for its insight into the world of art, for the mystery of the Reading portrait and most of all for bringing us just that little bit closer to Velázquez and helping me to understand better his genius.
And so finally, I urge you to seek him out. Through this marvellous book, of course, but also here in Madrid at the Prado, where Las Meninas awaits along with so many other works. It was love at first sight when I saw it, and each visit only deepens my attachment. Or if the Prado is too far the Rokeby Venus is at the National Gallery and Juan de Pareja at the Met. We’re in age where these treasures are more accessible than they have ever been and each canvas is worth the time and the energy.