Rubens Self-Portrait

This striking image of Rubens was engraved by J. L. Benoist as the frontispiece for the Galerie du Rubens, dit de Luxembourg, published in Paris in 1809. This deluxe production featured engravings of all twenty-four paintings in Maria de Medici series that were still in the gallery of the Luxembourg Palace for which Rubens had painted them in the early 1620s (Galerie de Rubens; Le Blanc, nos. 5-8). Each engraving from the series was accompanied by a text explaining its historical and allegorical dimensions. The book was published in two versions; one with the images printed in color, the other in black and white. One source for the frontispiece was the self-portrait that Rubens had painted on commission from the Prince of Wales, the future King Charles I of England, for the collection at Windsor Castle in 1622-23, during the same period in which he was painting the Marie de Medici series in Paris. His other source was the elaborate design within which Sebastien Le Clerc the Younger (1676-1763) had embedded the self-portrait by Rubens (see fig. 1). Le Clerc the Younger, whose father had been “graveur du Roi” to King Louis XIV, was a historical painter who often worked on a small scale. This is evident in the ease with which he placed the image of Rubens within an oval frame that was itself within a rectangular frame beneath which he had added an impressive cluster of objects representing Rubens’s rare personal mastery of “les attributes de la peinture et de la diplomatie” (Rooses, 4: 1043; Schneevogt, no. 35, p. 159). One of those objects was Rubens’s personal coat of arms, a larger engraving of which Melville was to acquire as the last of eleven illustrations in the essay on Rubens in his copy of The Works of Eminent Masters (1: 246).

As Christopher White points out, the self-portrait that Rubens painted for the Prince of Wales in 1623 is “an image of the artist in his prime—elegant, dignified, serious, independent, but with the air of the trustworthy ambassador he was soon to become” (by representing England in negotiations with Spain). Noting that this is one of “only four or five self-portraits,” White suggests that Rubens’ “premature baldness may have induced him to add the wide-brimmed hat,” which, however, “adds immeasurably to the scale of the design” (193). The self-image that Rubens created in this painting, and that Leclerc and Benoist augmented in the engraving that Melville acquired, accords well with the word picture Melville created of Rubens as “The Knight, Sir Peter Paul” in “At the Hostelry”: “Hatted in rich felt, spick and span, / Right comely in equipment free / With court-air of Lord Chamberlain” (NN BBO 60-64). Below is the original self-portrait in the collection at Windsor Castle that Melville visited on November 24, 1849 (fig. 2; NN J 24). In the essay on Windsor Castle in Melville’s copy of the 1843 edition of Hazlitt’s Criticisms on Art, this Self-Portrait is the first of ten paintings by Rubens listed in the “King’s Drawing Room, called the Rubens Room” (Appendix IV, xxxvii, no. 134).

Melville may have seen the original of Rubens’ “hatted” self-portrait during his visit to Windsor Castle in 1849, but only a portion of the state apartments were then open to visitors, so we cannot be sure exactly what he saw (NN J 318). He did see an engraving of that same self-portrait, in reverse, without the painterly and diplomatic equipment added by Leclerc and Benoist, in his copy of The Works of Eminent Masters, where it introduced the twenty-five-page essay on Rubens and his work (fig. 3; 1: 225). In that essay, Melville had access to the basics about Rubens’s career: boyhood in Cologne; early adulthood in Antwerp; artistic pilgrimage to Italy in 1600; return to Antwerp after the death of his mother in 1608; marriage to Isabella Brant in 1609; establishment of a flourishing studio in Antwerp; death of Isabella in 1626; artistic commissions and diplomatic missions taking him to France, England, Germany, Spain, and Italy; marriage to young Helen Fourment in 1830; a new family of five children; the rural retreat at Het Steen, whose environs inspired the late landscapes in which he painted “the floating vapours of the air.” That essay celebrates the prodigious varieties of subjects that Rubens painted in the style that came to be known as the Flemish High Baroque. By the time of his death in 1640 he had “reigned triumphant in all the branches of his art—in historical and allegorical pieces, in tableau de genre, in portraits, in animals, in fruit and flowers.” In painting, as in life, “his fecundity was inexhaustible” (1: 229-243). That fecundity is seen in the subjects of the nine engraved images between self-portrait of Rubens and his coat of arms in Melville’s copy of Works: Susannah and the Elders, The Sons of Rubens, Peace Concluded, The Visitation, Chateau of Rubens, The Rainbow, The Fight into Egypt, The Village Festival, The March of Silenus, and Venus and her loves (I: 225, 228, 229, 232, 233, 236, 237, 240, 241, 244, 246).

Below is the engraving labeled “Venus and the Loves—From a painting by Rubens” in Melville’s copy of Works (fig. 4; 1: 245). Venus, warm and fleshy, is bending her beauteous body to the excited attention of three eager cherubs, embodying the period, late in his career, in which Rubens was still responding to Titian’s Venetian Venuses. This is the period of the career that Melville evokes in the colloquy between Gerard Douw, Rubens, and Veronese in “At the Hostelry.” When Douw offers “a Phillis pleasant, / Plucking a delicate fat pheasant” as his idea of the “picturesque,” Rubens advises him instead to “Make her Venus, man, / Peachy and plump; and for the pheasant, / No fowl but will prove acquiescent / Promoted into Venus’ swan.” After suggesting this double transformation, Melville’s Rubens gives this further charge: “Then in suffused warm rosy weather / Sublime them in sun-cloud together” (NN BBO 159). Up there, the “peachy and plump” Venus that Melville imagines from Rubens would be a lovely companion for the sleeker, empyrean Venus in Boucher’s Venus et amours, the red chalk drawing whose “warm rosy” color is so lovingly preserved in the 1868 engraving by Péquégnot that Melville acquired (CAT 161).

As a collector of engravings, Melville would have been interested in Rubens not only as a painter but for the extraordinary group of engravers whose work, under his close supervision, contributed greatly to the popularity of his work throughout Europe during his lifetime. The essay on Rubens in Melville’s copy of Works gave close attention to this element of the painter’s career, indicating that “fifty engravers had been employed in engraving his works, listing Lucas Vosterman, Bolswert, C. Vischer, and six others by name while also listing a number of skillful engravings thought to have been executed by Rubens himself (1: 243). Georges Duplessis in Melville’s copy of The Wonders of Engraving is skeptical about the number of the engravings that had been attributed to Rubens, but he does reproduce the masterful engraving of Saint Catherine that he does believe was from Rubens’s hand (fig. 5). Duplessis considers Rubens to be the founder of the Flemish national school of engraving because of the way he inspired and supervised those who engraved his paintings, noting also that the quality of Flemish engraving declined swiftly after the death of Rubens and of those who had engraved his works in his lifetime (120).

In the early 1650s, a decade after Rubens died in Antwerp in 1640, Herman Melville’s ancestor Herman Harmense von Gansevoort arrived in Albany, New York, from the Netherlands. In 1870, two centuries after that, Herman Melville, at age 51, sat for a portrait by J. O. Eaton in New York City (fig. 6). Melville’s high forehead, skin complexion, and beard texture, along with his piercing, receptive expression, resemble those of the self-portrait that Rubens had painted at age 46 in 1623. One wonders if Melville saw the resemblance, and thought about the close proximity, in time and space, in which his Dutch ancestors and Rubens had lived. Might he or Eaton even have staged the pose in this portrait to heighten that resemblance (without, however, the “rich, felt” hat)?