As fascinated as Snare with the portrait, Cumming has fashioned an absorbing mystery.
A true tale that demonstrates the power and seduction of art.
Gracefully melding art history and biography, British art critic and editor Cumming (A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits, 2009, etc.) traces the life of John Snare, a 19th-century bookseller who became obsessed with a painting he happened to buy at an auction: a portrait, he came to believe, of King Charles I as a young prince, made when he visited Madrid—not by Van Dyck, to whom it was attributed, but, Snare was certain, by the eminent Diego Velázquez (1599-1660). Cumming traces Snare’s efforts to find evidence for his increasingly firm conviction, the furor over public displays of the work, and the effects of his obsession on his career, well-being, and family. Interwoven with chapters following Snare’s adventures is a discerning look at Velázquez, hardly known outside of Spain in the 19th century. “He left so few paintings—not more than 120 over a forty-year career,” Cumming reveals, that his art “was rare, unfamiliar, obscure” even to art lovers and critics. Analyzing his technique, themes, and compassion for his subjects, she makes a convincing case that his paintings “are both dazzling and profoundly moving all at once.” Snare, despite “no education, no social standing, no pedigree as a gentleman or an expert on painting,” recognized Velázquez’s greatness. He worked tirelessly to document the portrait’s provenance; poured his savings into mounting exhibitions in London, Edinburgh, and New York; and several times hired lawyers to counter suits contesting his right of ownership. His business went bankrupt, and, leaving his wife and children in England, he fled to America, hoping to earn money from exhibiting his prized possession, which he defiantly refused to sell. After his death, the painting was never again seen.
As fascinated as Snare with the portrait, Cumming has fashioned an absorbing mystery.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6215-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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