Our Saviour Healing the Blind
CAT 111. Richard Earlom after Josiah Boydell after Annibale Carracci. Our Saviour Healing the Blind, mezzotint. London: John Boydell, 1785. The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by N. Vaslova.
Immediately upon entering the Spouter-Inn in chapter 3 of Moby-Dick, Ishmael encounters a painting without a label, a name, or even a discernable subject. Even after examining the canvas itself, along with his own responses to it, and even after consulting “many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the subject,” Ishmael is able to offer us only “a final theory of my own” about the subject of the painting itself and the source of its “nameless yeast” (NN MD 12-13). In this entry we are faced with the subject of a mezzotint engraving without access to the engraving itself or the names of the engraver or artist who created the image.
On May 13, 1869, relatively early in his life as an active collector of Old Master prints, Herman Melville had a second thought about the print he had recently left to be framed by Elias Dexter on Broadway. He therefore wrote this note from “Down Town” in New York City (fig. 1):
Figure 1. Letter from Herman Melville to Elias Dexter, May 13, 1869. Melville Memorial Room, Berkshire Athenaeum
Melville’s first sentence shows that he was already quite sophisticated as a collector of prints:
That mezzotint, The Healing of the Blind, which I left at your place—pray, be good enough to cause the Lettering at bottom, when cut off, to be glued upon the back of the frame.
His second sentence shows that he was especially drawn to this particular print:
I am glad, by the way, that my chance opinion of that picture receives the confirmation of such a judge as yourself.
In the third and last sentence Melville thanks Dexter for “the little print after Murillo” (NN CO 469).
The “little print after Murillo” is one of an unknown number of prints from Melville’s collection whose location is currently unknown. “That mezzotint, The Healing of the Blind,” is another. Among all the prints that have been made after all the known paintings by Murillo we have no way of knowing which one Melville might have gratefully received from Dexter on the day he wrote the above note. Unless new information comes forth, that Murillo print must remain in that curatorial limbo to which Ishmael assigned those “uncertain, fugitive, half-fabulous whales” he was unable to classify in the “Cetology” chapter of Moby-Dick (NN MD 144).
With “that mezzotint, The Healing of the Blind” we do know the subject of the print and the technique by which it was engraved. These do help us to narrow the possible combination of artist and engraver whose names were presumably spelled out in the Lettering that Melville asked Dexter to glue to the back of the frame.