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Cover of The Vanishing Velázquez: A 19th Century Bookseller's Obsession With A Lost Masterpiece

The Vanishing Velázquez: A 19th Century Bookseller's Obsession With A Lost Masterpiece

by Laura Cumming

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From one of the world's most expert art critics, the incredible true story--part art history and part mystery--of a Velázquez portrait that went missing and the obsessed nineteenth-century bookseller determined to prove he had found it. When John Snare, a nineteenth-century provincial bookseller, traveled to a liquidation auction, he stumbled on a vivid portrait of King Charles I that defied any explanation. The Charles of the painting was young--too young to be king--and yet also too young to be painted by the Flemish painter to which the work was attributed. Snare had found something incredible--but what? His research brought him to Diego Velázquez, whose long-lost portrait of Prince Charles has eluded art experts for generations.…

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NPR Books We Love
"Oh, to love anything as much as Laura Cumming loves Diego Velázquez. *The Vanishing Velázquez * follows a Victorian bookseller who acquires a painting that consumes him and then disappears; it’s part detective story, part meditation on the nature of art and its ability to transform us in very strange ways. But Cumming’s ineffable tenderness toward the painter elevates this to paean. By the time she describes bookseller John Snare — “He did not see the painting as a thing apart, remote from his own existence; it filled his mind as if it were a living being” — we know she is describing herself, too."
NPR Books We Love — 2016 · apps.npr.org