Peter Paul Rubens

Melville would have seen Rubens’s celebrated Marie de Medici cycle when he visited the Louvre on November 30, 1849. Arriving in Cologne ten days later, he wrote in his journal that “there is much to interest a pondering man like me” in “this antiquated gable-ended old town . . . where Rubens was born & Mary de Medeci died.” Melville might have got the false information that Rubens was actually born in Cologne from the copy of the A Hand-book for Travellers on the Continent  that John Murray had given him after arriving in London. He would also have got it if he visited Rubens’s former home at 10 Sternen Gasse in Cologne (NN J 35-36, 349). Since 1822, two “stone tablets, inserted in the front wall of a plain-looking house,” had marked the site not only as the birthplace of Peter Paul Rubens but as the house in which Marie de Medici “came to end her days . . . in the very chamber which had witnessed the painter’s birth.” Those words are from the essay on Rubens in the 1854 copy of The Works of the Eminent Masters that Melville acquired in 1871 (1: 225). In 1871, Melville also acquired the copy of Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England in which he marked a passage about Rubens’s Marie de Medici series: https://melvillesmarginalia.org/Share.aspx?DocumentID=122&PageID=43775 (MMO 543a, 160.35-42). 

During his one full day in Cologne in 1849, young Melville went first to “the famous cathedral, where the everlasting ‘crane’ stands on the tower,” this being the tower that had been left uncompleted since 1509. Seeing this tower led directly to the famous declaration in chapter 32 of Moby-Dick that “I now leave my cetology System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing on the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by the first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything” (NN MD 145). After attending a Sunday service at the Cathedral, Melville went to St. Peter’s Church, where Rubens had been baptized. There he “saw the celebrated Descent from the Cross by Rubens” after having to pay “2 francs to see the original picture turned round by the Sacristan.” This painting depicted not the descent of Christ from the cross, as Melville’s phrasing might imply, but the Crucifixion of St. Peter, upside down, on the cross (fig. 2; NN J 35-36, 348-51). 

The twenty-five page essay on Rubens in Melville’s copy of The Works of the Eminent Masters concludes with a handy list of original paintings by Rubens in museums, galleries, and churches that Melville visited in England, France, and Germany in 1849 (243-250). One paragraph lists twenty-one individual titles in the Mary de Medici series at the Louvre. One painting by Rubens that Melville noted in his 1857 journal was in Turin, Italy: “Rubens’ Magdalen—excellently true to nature, but very ugly” (NN J 122). Issues of truth to nature were of keen interest to Melville whether reading about a Rubens rainbow in Hazlitt, seeing a Magdalen in a gallery, or writing his own poetry or prose. The extent to which the ugly can be compatible with pictorial beauty and truth is a major subject of contention between Dutch and Italian artists in “At the Hostelry,” the unpublished colloquy about the pictorial picturesque that Melville was still revising at the time of his death (in which Rubens makes a cameo appearance to introduce Veronese to the conversation). Such issues had also been important during Melville’s early career as a novelist, especially in the 1849 review of his first three novels by Philaréte Chasles in Paris, published in the The Literary World in New York as “The Actual and Fantastic Voyages of Herman Melville” on August 4, 1849. Chasles was much more responsive to the imaginative strength of Melville’s Mardi than most critics had been, but for him, in Mardi, the young author’s “exuberant style is too ornate.” Melville’s “tints á la Rubens, his warm and violent colors, his predilection for dramatic effect, [and] his efflorescent descriptions shock the taste” (90). 

Four months after this important French review appeared in New York, Melville was applying his own eye to the coloring of Rubens’s Mary de Medici cycle in the Louvre and to the Crucifixion of St. Peter in Cologne. Later in December, after returning to London before sailing home, Melville made two visits to the celebrated private collection (and breakfast room) of the poet Samuel Rogers. The poet/collector owned four paintings by Rubens, three of which every visitor was certain to see. Rogers liked to show his guests the Old Masters were not “deficient in nature” by pointing to the foreground of a Rubens forest scene in his own dining room (Bishop 110-11). That painting was the Landscape—A Woody Scene by Moonlight that Rubens had painted near his rural retreat at Het Steen cerca 1637 (fig. 3), about the same time as The Rainbow Landscape so beloved by Hazlitt.  

This painting was already well known in England by the time Rogers acquired it in 1832 because it had previously belonged to Sir Joshua Reynolds, who referred to it in the Eighth Discourse he gave at the Royal Academy in 1788. The German critic Gustave Waagen, visiting Rogers’s collection in 1835, admired this painting for “the clear reflection of the moon in the water, its effect of the flat distance, and the contrast of the dark mass of trees in the foreground,” all of which are “a proof of the deep feeling for striking incidents in nature which was peculiar to Rubens” (2:79). After influencing the landscapes of Gainsborough while in Reynolds’s collection, Landscape by Moonlight influenced the landscapes of Constable and Turner while in Rogers’s collection. As Helen Braham and Robert Bruce-Gardner noted in 1988, the “poetic effect of nocturnal solitude” in this painting “heralded a new and subjective approach to nature which continued to inspire artists in Great Britain . . . for over two centuries” (579). 

When Landscape by Moonlight entered the permanent collection at Somerset House in London in 1978, close technical examination during the process of cleaning and conservation enabled Braham and Bruce-Gardner to verify the degree to which Rubens’s “powers of invention and originality in landscapes had reached their peak” on this canvas. They note that Landscape by Moonlight had become increasingly influential in France in the second half of the nineteenth century, where it was called Clair de Lune. They cite Roger Fry’s 1927 assertion that Rubens in this painting “followed his immediate impression so breathlessly that he becomes literally an impressionist.” Determined to “lose nothing of that exhilarating movement of atmosphere, light and colour,” Rubens “jumps three centuries of history in art to find himself side by side with Renoir” (586-89, 590). In 1844, decades before the advent of French impressionism, Anna Jameson wrote that “there are certain pictures of Rubens” in the collection of Samuel Rogers whose colouring is so strong that, “before we are near enough to discern form or subject, affect the senses like a bed of flowers with the sunshine playing over them” (384). Imagine the impression the light and color of Landscape by Moonlight would have made on young Melville under the tutelage of Rogers in December 1849, four months after the French critic Chasles had objected to “tints á la Rubens, his warm and violent colors, [and] his efflorescent descriptions [that] shock the taste” (90). 

Two other Rubens paintings in Rogers’s collection were very highly valued by the German critic Gustav Waagen after his visit in 1835. One was a free copy, three feet high by five feet wide, from Mantegna’s Triumph of Julius Caesar (fig. 4). Rubens based the design of “this highly interesting picture” on one of the nine paintings of the Triumph of Julius Caesar” he had seen during his residence in Mantua in the early 1600s. Waagen emphasizes that the artist’s “tendency to the fantastical and grand” led him not only to “select the picture with the elephants carrying the candelabra” but also to convert the “harmless sheep” in Mantegna’s original into “a lion and a lioness, growling angrily at the elephant. Nor is the elephant more peacefully disposed, but, with an expression of fury, is on the point of striking the lion a blow with his trunk” (2:79; see this action in the lower right hand corner of the crowded image below). 

Anna Jameson remains highly attuned to colouring in paintings by Rubens in her highly appreciative essay on “The Collection of Mr. Rogers.” She contrasts the “rainbow-like magnificence of Rubens” with “the more sober splendour of Paul Veronese.” Beyond the intense pleasures of color, there are “certain pictures” in this collection which possess “a yet higher value,” those “which may be said to epitomize the characteristic merits of the greatest painters.” For Jameson, one of these is Rubens’s “version of Andrea Mantegna’s Triumph of Julius Caesar.” She claims, in fact, that “there is not, perhaps, a more interesting picture in the world.” That painting is “so far from being a copy, that it is a kind of double original. It is the blended reflection of two master minds, the antipodes of each other, and here meeting midway. It is as wonderful as a psychological curiosity, as it beautiful as a work of art” (388, 389-90).  

Elizabeth Rigby, the former Lady Eastlake, made a similar point in the “Reminiscences of Samuel Rogers” she published in 1888. She considered the painting in which “one of Mantegna’s Triumphs” has been “Rubenized by the great Flemish master” to be a “curious cross, unique in art, between two magnificent masters as different as Padua is from Antwerp” (508-09). Jameson’s image of “two master minds, the antipodes of each other . . . meeting midway,” and Rigby’s image of the “curious cross” between “two magnificent masters as different as Padua is a from Antwerp,” each anticipate the artistic credo that Melville published in his poem “Art” in 1891. “What unlike things must meet and mate,” he declared, “And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart, / To wrestle with the angel—Art” (NN PP 280).  

Jameson’s entry on Rubens’s Triumphal Procession—after Andrea Mantegna (no. 50 in her inventory of Rogers’s collection) notes that Mantegna’s series of nine paintings depicting the The Triumphs of Julius Caesar, which was still “in all its freshness and beauty” when Rubens saw it in the ducal palace in Mantua in the early 1600s, was now, in the 1840s, at Hampton Court in England (407). Melville would have been able to see those paintings during his visit to Hampton Court on November 11, 1849, five weeks before the first of his two visits to Rogers’s collection. Young Melville wrote in his journal that “the place is full of pictures.” Mantegna’s “Triumphs of Julius Caesar, consisting of nine pictures in watercolours,” were listed as numbers 805-813 among 1068 paintings at Hampton Court the 1843 edition of Hazlitt’s Criticisms on Art that Melville acquired in 1871 (Appendix III, xxix).  In addition to briefly noting paintings by Lely, Van Dyke, Guido, Titian, and Rembrandt, Melville wrote that “The Cartoons are not well disposed to light.” The editors of the journal suggest that Melville is “probably” referring to Raphael’s series of cartoons on the Acts of the Apostles, which were the “glory” of the collection. But they also indicate that “Mantegna’s cartoons, The Triumphs of Caesar,” were “almost equally famous” (NN J 16, 284). Knowing that young Melville had visited Hampton Court, Rogers would certainly have mentioned the variety of ways in which his Triumphal Procession by Rubens had been inspired by one of the Triumphs of Mantegna.  

The third painting by Rubens that Waagen admired at the time of his visit to Rogers’s collection in 1835 was “a study for the celebrated picture of the Terrors of War, in the Pitti Palace at Florence.” In Waagen’s words, “Venus is endeavouring in vain to restrain Mars, the insatiable warrior, as Homer calls him, who is hurrying away to scenes of destruction. . . . In warmth of power of colouring and spirited and careful execution,” this painting is “one of the most admirable of Rubens’ small pictures” (fig. 5; 2: 79).  

Anna Jameson was equally enamored of this study for The Horrors of War when she inventoried Rogers’s collection in the mid-1840s. She considered this painting to be “a combination, on a small scale, of every quality for which Rubens is remarkable,--his sumptuous fancy, his turn for allegory, his potent luxuriance of colour, his ardent life and movement, his energy and facility of touch,--all are here.” They all combine to animate the canvas in which “Venus is endeavouring to detain Mars, who, hurrying from her arms, rushes on to war, led by Discord and the Furies, and trampling the arts and sciences under his feet. A fine moral allegory, painted with extraordinary vigour, and more elegance of form than is with Rubens usual. The back of one of the prostrate female figures, with her lute broken, is particularly beautiful” (389, 407-408). 

After seeing this famous study for the Horrors of War during his two visits to Samuel Rogers in December 1849, Melville would have seen the celebrated painting itself during his two visits to the Pitti Palace in Florence in 1857 (NN J 114, 116). After his first visit on March 24 he wrote of the “excess of pleasure” in the galleries of the Pitti and Uffizi palaces. In the copy of Valery’s Travels through Italy that Melville acquired while in Florence (see our introduction to Italian Renaissance Artists), Valery described the paintings in the Pitti Palace as perhaps the finest in all of Italy, calling attention to Rubens’s Allegory of the Ravages of War for being “so full of life and truth” (573). Back in home in America, Melville published Battle-Pieces, his book of poetry on the ravages of his own nation’s Civil War, in 1866. As he built his print collection during the next twenty-five years, he had a tactile reminder of the study for Rubens’s Horrors of War he had seen in Rogers’s collection in 1849, as well as the finished painting he had seen at the Pitti Palace in 1857, in his personal copy of the engraving of Mars going to War that George Cooke had engraved for the Historic Gallery of Portraits and Paintings in 1811 (fig. 6; see our discussion under CAT 198). 

In Melville’s collection, this engraving after Rubens’s Mars going to War was accompanied by eleven engravings from the Historic Gallery relating to Rubens’s celebrated cycle on the life of Mary de Medicis that young Melville would have seen at the Louvre in Paris in 1849 (our CAT 186-197). It is possible that Melville would have inherited these prints from his father Allan, a collector of paintings and prints who died in Albany in 1832, when Herman was twelve years old. Allan, as a young man from Boston on the Grand Tour of Europe in 1801-02, lived for more than a year making business contacts in Paris, where any art-loving American would have visited the twenty-four paintings in Rubens’s Mary de Medici series, then still at the Luxembourg Gallery for which Rubens had painted them in the 1620s. On that visit to Paris as a young man, Allan Melvill and his brother Thomas spent considerable time in the social circle of Mme. Recamier, whose portrait Jacques-Louis David had left unfinished in 1800 (see MBB 3.5). When Allan returned to Paris and London as a merchant in 1818, he would presumably have seen Rubens’s Mary de Medici series again, this time at the Louvre, to which its twenty-four paintings had been transferred in 1815-16. Twenty-one of those paintings were conveniently listed in a single paragraph of the essay on Rubens in the copy of The Works of Eminent Masters that Herman Melville acquired in 1871 (243). 

Herman was born a year after his father returned from Paris in 1818. He drew upon his own life a child in the opening pages of Redburn, the novel published in 1849 whose autobiographical narrator declares in the opening pages that “we had several oil paintings and rare old engravings of my father’s, which he had himself bought in Paris, hanging up in the dining room.” They also had “two large green French portfolios of colored prints, more than I could left at that age.” Every Saturday Redburn and his siblings would “spread them on the floor” and “gaze at them with never-failing delight” (NN R 6). Below is the portrait of Allan Melville by John Rubens Smith, now at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, painted in 1810, four years before Allan settled down to marry Maria Gansevoort of Albany and father eight children, including Herman, by the time he died in 1832 (fig. 7). 

If Melville’s father had introduced him as a young child to the pleasures and allure of European paintings and prints imported from Paris, Samuel Rogers had personally initiated him as a young novelist into one of the finest private collections of European art in London, illuminated through the eyes and mind of one of the city’s most gracious and sophisticated connoisseurs. Five years before young Melville’s two visits to Rogers’s collection in 1849, Anna Jameson had written this: “Had I undertaken to educate the eye and the mind of one not deficient in sensibility, but whose taste was yet to be formed, I should desire nothing more or better than occasional access to such a collection as this. An acquaintance with and a due appreciation of what is here, would fix the standard of excellence at such a height, even while it extended the sphere of sympathy and enjoyment, that the former could not be easily lowered, nor the latter easily lowered, after such an initiation” (386). Below is Chester Harding’s portrait of Samuel Rogers in 1847, two years before Herman Melville made two visits to his private gallery and its extraordinary collection of paintings by Rubens and other European Old Masters (fig. 8).  

For Melville’s access to paintings of other Old Masters during his two visits to the private collection of Samuel Rogers in December 1849, see our discussions of Raphael in Samuel Rogers’s London Home; Titian's Noli me Tangere; Veronese’s Mary Magdalen in London in 1849 and Italy in 1857; Seeing the Carracci with Samuel Rogers ; Domenichino in Landscape and in the Cathedral of Naples; and Guido beyond the Cenci.