Talk
The Vanishing Man
10 Jun 2016
Regular hours
- Friday
- 11:00 – 21:00
Cost of entry
£7/£6 concession/£5 Members
Address
- Trafalgar Square
- London
England - WC2N 5DN
- United Kingdom
Hear art critic Laura Cumming discuss how a Velázquez painting changed her life.
About
Hear art critic Laura Cumming discuss how a Velázquez painting changed both her life and that of John Snare's – the Victorian bookseller’s at the heart of her latest novel, 'The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez', a compelling synthesis of detective story and biography.
Snare came across a dirt-blackened portrait of a prince at a country house auction in 1845. Suspecting that it might be a long-lost Velázquez, he bought the picture and set out to discover its strange history. When Cumming stumbled across the story, it sent her on a quest of her own, following him from London to Edinburgh and 19th-century New York, and from triumph to ruin.
Cumming is joined by Letizia Treves, Curator of Italian and Spanish Paintings 1600–1800, to consider how and why Velázquez's paintings mesmerise us and why some were overlooked and misattributed for centuries.
