Lost, found and lost again

This is an extraordinary story. In 1845 John Snare, an unremarkable Reading bookseller, goes to an auction in a defunct boarding school where he buys, for £8, a painting catalogued as a half-length portrait of Charles I, ‘supposed’ to be by Van Dyck. In mid-19th century Britain a Van Dyck is a known and immensely desirable object, but from the outset Snare thinks that he has found a painting by Diego Velázquez, whose work is, by comparison, little known at the time here. He thinks he has, in fact, found the ‘lost Velázquez’, painted in Madrid in 1623 when the 22-year-old Prince Charles travelled incognito to Spain to seek a marriage alliance with Philip IV’s younger sister, Maria Anna.

Though even the existence of the portrait is only known from a couple of references, and Snare himself is no more than an ingénue in the ruthless and snobbish world of 19th-century connoisseurship, he doggedly runs to earth every scrap of evidence to establish the painting’s provenance and authenticity.