Parting Thought on Dughet, Patel, and Pérelle

All the prints in this section, the one Dughet, the one Patel, and the five Pérelles, deepen our awareness of Melville’s engagement with the Claudean landscape tradition. Late in life, several of these prints would have taken Melville back to paintings he had seen during visits to the picture galleries of England and France in 1849. Others relate more specifically to his Mediterranean and European travels of 1857. All of them enriched his general understanding of the Claudean landscape tradition that informed his poetry in Clarel as well as in Timoleon. We will find further evidence of Melville’s interest in the Claudean landscape tradition in the Dutch, German, and English sections of the collection.