Ed Vulliamy and Michael Jacobs became friends late in life, but discovered to their delight that they both had Irish Republican ancestors who may well have known each other in the lead-up to the 1916 Rising in Dublin.
More to the point, both men were tireless students of art who had bonded through their engagement with art. Vulliamy was steeped in Renaiassance art and the work of Italian painters of the time. Jacobs was more inclined to the work of Diego Velázquez (1599-1660), to the glorious heritage of his adopted Spain - he settled in the Andalucian village of Frailes - and the culture of the wider Hispanic world.
Aside from travel writings based on his peregrinations through the historic veins of Iberia, Jacobs wrote two acclaimed travel books in relatively recent times. His vivid exploration of the Andes, simply entitled Andes, was published in 2010. The Robber of Memories: A River Journey Through Columbia appeared in 2012. Both books were published by Granta, as is this final, brief work.
Much of Everything is Happening - which is an an unfinished set of writings - analyses just one painting, Las Meninas. Velázquez's masterpiece depicts a seemingly casual, random family scene from the court of King Philip IV of Spain (1605-1665). Painted in 1656, Las Meninas was seen by both Vulliamy and Jacobs as the key to the great push forward towards the Enlightenment, away from the visual assumptions of the Renaissance. The sense exuded by the work of a number of vanishing points, and the presence of a mirror in the painting still challenge - and indeed confound - the viewer. Las Meninas translates as 'Ladies in Waiting', a title which the painting was given some two centuries after its execution.
In the painting, Velázquez, court painter and confidante of the King, is himself depicted standing at the easel, brush in hand, looking outwards. Is he looking at the viewer of his painting? Or is he looking at the couple he may be painting, King Philip and Queen Mariana who appear to be reflected in the mirror? These are the questions that have engaged, not just art historians, but ordinary viewers for centuries. Has the Infanta just arrived in the room or is she about to depart? Or have her parents, the King and Queen, come to visit her and it is she rather than they who is the subject of the painting?
The story of Las Meninas' present dwelling in Madrid's Museo del Prado is also part of Jacobs' 108-page narrative. It is a story of occasional threat and danger, solved on one occasion by hasty removal - ultimately to Geneva - when the Museo del Prado was being bombed by Nationalist forces in 1936. In 1754, it was saved from a fire at the Royal Alcazar although there was some damage done to the left cheek of the Infanta, since restored.
The 200-page book - amplified by Vulliamy's introduction and coda - is leavened with engaging anecdote from Jacobs, who decides at the outset to travel from London to Madrid on trains. He wants to replicate the spirit at least of the pilgrimage he made as a penurious young student, some four decades before. Through his obsession with Las Meninas, he meets old acquaintances and friends and researches its origins and history. The obsession, Vulliamy suggests, may have sprung from contemplation of his impending demise following kidney cancer. Whatever about the truth off this theory, Everything is Happening is an absorbing, touching account from a genial and evidently gregarious man, who is sorely missed by his friends.
Paddy Kehoe
