Laura Cumming

Laura Cumming (born July 1961) the art critic for The Observer. In addition to her career in journalism, Cumming has written well-received books on self-portraits in art and the discovery of a lost portrait by Diego Velazquez in 1845.

Early life

Cumming is the daughter of the Scottish artist James Cumming and his wife, the artist Betty Elston. She has a brother Timothy.

Career

Cumming has been literary editor of the BBC's The Listener, an assistant editor on the New Statesman, worked on the Literary Review, as a BBC arts producer, and the presenter of Nightwaves on BBC Radio 3. She has been art critic of The Observer, since 1999.^[1][2]

Cumming has written two well-received books on art. Her work on self-portraits, A face to the world (2009), was praised by Serena Davies in The Daily Telegraph for seeking to "persuade us, with sumptuous superlatives, how great her subjects are" rather than baffling the reader with art theory as some other works do.^[3] Her work on the discovery of a lost Diego Velazquez portrait by John Snare in 1845, The vanishing man: In pursuit of Velazquez (2016), was described by Honor Clerk in The Spectator as "a study in obsession, a paean of praise to an artist of genius, a detective story and, for the author, an exorcism of grief".^[4] Fisun Güner, in The Independent praised the "beautifully compelling accounts of Velázquez's paintings" that revealed as much about Cumming's own relationship with the work of Velázquez as it did about the ostensible subject of the book.^[5] Jonathan Beckman in The Times, however, felt that the book was "breathless" and that its source materials (or lack thereof) didn't completely support the weight that Cumming placed on them.^[6] The book was serialised on BBC Radio 4 in a reading by Siobhan Redmond.^[7]

Appointments

In 2011, Cumming was appointed as a director of Trinity London Academy Trust, a co-educational free school serving south west London.

Personal life

Cumming married Dennis Sewell, a contributing editor of The Spectator, in Westminster in 2002. They live in Clapham, south London.

Selected publications

• Julian Barnes. Book Trust in association with the British Council, London, 1990.
• A face to the world: On self-portraits. HarperPress, London, 2009. ISBN 9780007118434
• The vanishing man: In pursuit of Velazquez. Chatto & Windus, London, 2016, ISBN 9780701188443; published in the United States as The Vanishing Velásquez: A 19th-century Bookseller's Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece Scribner, New York, 2016, ISBN 978-1-4767-6215-9.

References