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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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