John Brewer
Ars Longa…
The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez
By Laura Cumming
Chatto & Windus 296pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
Laura Cumming’s The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez is a tale of two devotees of the great Spanish court painter, one a 19th-century bookseller from Reading called John Snare, the other the author herself. What unites this odd couple across more than a century is their shared passion for the artist. When Cumming contrasts Snare’s fervour for Velázquez with the orderly deliberations of art historians, she is also speaking of herself. Snare was, she says, ‘looking at a single work of art with the power to affect the viewer as a person or a poem might … He is an evangelist for his Velázquez: he wants … the world to see and love it as he does.’ The only difference is that Snare was a marginal figure obsessed with a single painting, a putative Velázquez portrait of the young Prince Charles completed in 1623 during the future king’s fruitless visit to Madrid in pursuit of a Spanish marriage, while Cumming, as The Observer’s art critic and author of a highly regarded study, A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits, has much more authority to speak about Velázquez’s work as a whole.
Cumming deftly moves back and forth between the sad story of Snare’s efforts to authenticate ‘his’ Velázquez and her own enthusiastic and vivid account of many of the artist’s greatest works, but the two parts differ in tone. Cumming’s telling of Snare’s tale reads like a skilfully plotted detective story
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'As it starts to infect your dreams, you realise that "Portal 2" is really an allegory of the imaginative leap: the way in which we traverse the space between distant concepts, via the secret conduits we place within them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony
'Any story about Eden has to be a story about the Fall; unchanging serenity does not make a narrative.'
@suzifeay reviews Jim Crace's 'eden'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trouble-in-paradise
The first holiday camps had an 'ethos of muscular health as a marker of social respectability, and were alcohol-free. How different from our modern Costa Brava – not to mention the innumerable other coasts around the world now changed forever'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/from-mont-blanc-to-magaluf