Bentley after Cuyp. A Sunny Day

Unlike Jan Both, who did go to Italy, and Nicolaes Berchem, who may have, Aelbert Cuyp never did. He lived his entire life in the environs of his native Dordrecht, his most extensive travel being up the Rhine to Nigmegan. Cuyp appears to have borrowed his Italianate light from the paintings of Both—and to have preceded Berchem in his mastery of Both’s Italianate style (Chong, Grove, 294). 

Unlike Both and Berchem, Cuyp was not well-known among his Dutch countrymen or in eighteenth-century France. His greatness was first widely appreciated in early nineteenth-century England, as is richly documented in Melville’s collection. Melville’s two engravings after Cuyp were published in England in 1840 and 1846. Each print shows Cuyp's exceptional ability to depict human and animal figures in a Dutch landscape. In A Sunny Day, the herdsmen and cattle are the center of attention. The vista is more panoramic than Landscape, with Ruins of an Old Tower, Forester & Dogs (CAT 220). Each canvas is bathed in the Italianate light that Both brought to Dutch painting. 

In Melville’s collection, A Sunny Day is the perfect complement to Berchem’s Crossing the Ford. The two herdsmen in Cuyp’s painting are as close to the cattle as the woman is to the bull in the Berchem. Cuyp’s four foreground figures are all perched on a gentle rise before a wide expanse bathed in afternoon summer light. Time and labor are in suspense as warmth and light fill the river valley and the human heart. On Cuyp’s canvas the idealized Italianate landscapes of Swanevelt, Both, and Berchem have been brought to a height and a breadth of suspended, intimate, sunstruck perfection (fig. 1). 

Melville would have seen the original painting when he visited the Dulwich Picture Gallery on November 17, 1849, and found the whole gallery “full of gems” (NN J 20). He acquired his engraving of the painting much later in life, in October 1887, as a gift from his wife Lizzie. The Sunny Day came at a propitious time in his life as a collector. Having officially retired from his job as an inspector at the Custom House on New Year’s Day 1886, Herman now had much more leisure time than before. During that year, Lizzie received a legacy that enabled her to supply him with $25 a month for the purchase of  “books and prints” (Metcalf 265). If Herman’s framing of The Healing of the Blind at Dexter’s shop in 1869 had symbolized in any way his and Lizzie’s need to recover from the suicide of their son Malcolm, perhaps her gift to him of A Sunny Day eighteen years later presaged better days to come (fig. 2). 

Melville’s inscribed engraving of A Sunny Day is one of the few prints for which we know the year of acquisition. It is mounted on a hinged support that may have been his way of displaying it in the family home. One of his unpublished writing projects during the last four years of his life was a collection of manuscript poems he intended to call Weeds and Wildings with a Rose or Two. Several of the “Rose” poems are symbolic expressions of his love for Lizzie. Several of the “Weeds and Wildings” poems are explicit tributes to the kind of “way-side weeds” that Cuyp depicts with such loving attention in the glow of the setting sun in the foreground of A Sunny Day (NN BBO 73-138). In 1999 Desmond Shawe-Taylor was still noting the way in which “even the weeds, stumps, and grasses of the foreground” of Cuyp’s painting “are lit up in strange patterns by the slanting light of the setting sun” (176). Melville in his engraving of the same painting had a clearer depiction of those weeds, stumps, and grasses themselves (compare our figures 1 and 2). 

J.C. Bentley engraved A Sunny Day for the Gems of European Art in 1846, six years after he had engraved Fielding’s Temple of Minerva at Aegina (CAT 16). The letterpress that accompanies A Sunny Day indicates that the original painting is “one of the purest gems of the collection at Dulwich.” Moreover, "it is almost universally recognized as the finest Cuyp in the Gallery” even though there are eighteen others. On this canvas, “the sun is beginning to set, and the clouds are giving promise of golden glory. The composition—in perfect harmony with the rich tones of colour—breathes of a repose approaching lassitude. A sunny day of summer is drawing towards a close.” About Cuyp himself, “very little is known.” His “only teacher was his father,” a painter whom he “far surpassed.” Most of what we know of him “lives in his works” (Hall, 57-58). The Dulwich painting Bentley engraved as A Sunny Day, now known as Herdsmen with Cattle, was known in Melville’s day as Cattle with Figures near a River with Mountains.  

Melville had access to a much more extensive account of Cuyp and his works in the twelve-page double-column illustrated essay on that painter in his copy of Works of the Eminent Masters from 1854. This author, too, laments that so little is known about the painter’s actual life. Yet he treats what was known with a sensitivity Melville was sure to appreciate, beginning with the fact that many paintings “which now are highly valued, and which fetch good prices, were during the lifetime of the artist almost unsaleable.” Like Rembrandt, Cuyp “appears to know nothing of the war which is raging about him,” but instead devotes himself to the “quiet, calm, unobtrusive” study of nature. Unlike those pastoral painters who specialize in depicting “rustic misery” (a subject that Melville satirizes in Pierre as the “povertiresque”), Cuyp “loves well-fed cattle, clean and well-combed horses, and broad daylight casting its golden lustre over the plain.” In contrast to the early English admirers who began to call Cuyp “the Claude Lorraine of Holland” for his treatment of the sun, this writer sees in some of Cuyp’s animals a “terrible genius” comparable to that which “Poussin gives to his heroes” (1: 177-81).   

The essay in Works celebrates not only Cuyp’s technical finesse but his range of genres: landscape and cattle pieces, equestrian portraits, maritime scenes, moonlight as well as daytime studies. Cuyp’s marine scenes are as “vivid, powerful, and true” as his landscapes. “They transport you bodily to the ports and seas of Holland.” One example is the engraving of View of Dordrecht that illustrates this essay in Works (fig. 3). The vessels "are arranged in line, their prows towards the centre of the picture. . . . Gazing at the picture from a distance, we are struck by the effect of the shadows of the vessels in the limpid water. Looking nearer, we are still more surprised at the dashing and masterly style in which the whole is executed. . . . No painter, Van der Velde excepted, ever has been able to give an equally just and life-like representation of Dutch naval characteristics” (1: 180, 182). As we will see in chapter 7, the English painter Turner was to be directly influenced by this and other Cuyp marine scenes.

For the Works author, Cuyp was unique in his ability to “combine the various characteristics of most of his contemporaries. He equals all of them, and is sometimes their superior. . . . No Dutch landscape painter has carried further the knowledge of aerial perspective. No one has carried further the power of representing air, transparence, depth, and purity of atmospheric effect in his pictures.” If it is true that he has himself too often been imitated by mediocre artists, “it is the privilege of genius to be pilfered.” It is also the privilege of genius to require further study. Before briefly describing four of the nineteen Cuyps in the Dulwich Gallery, the author is happy to declare that “it is part of the progressive education of this country that picture-galleries are now beginning to be fully appreciated by the millions, and it is the pleasant province of a work like that we are publishing here to assist the great mass of the country in forming correct ideas in relation to the great masters, who otherwise would be confused.  Everyone can admire a striking and effective picture, but it is only after some study that its beauties can be fully appreciated” (184-86). 

 We know from Melville’s own markings in The Works of the Eminent Masters how much that work helped him in the study of great art. Another great inspiration, of course, was Hazlitt, whose essay on “The Dulwich Gallery” is one of those that Melville marked in his copy of Hazlitt’s Criticisms on Art. Hazlitt introduces the Dulwich Gallery as “a palace of thought—another universe, built of air, or shadows, of colours.” Immediately upon entering, “we were first struck by our old friends the Cuyps.” The first one he sees right inside the door is the original of Melville’s A Sunny Day. “It is woven of ethereal hues. A soft mist is on it, a veil of subtle air. The tender green of the valleys beyond, the gleaming lake, the purple light of the hills, have an effect like the down on an unripe nectarine. You may lay your finger on the canvas; but miles of dewy vapour and sunshine are between you and the objects you survey. It is almost needless to point out that the cattle and figures in the foreground, like dark transparent spots, give an immense relief to the perspective. This is, we think, perhaps the finest Cuyp in the world” (Criticisms on Art 23-24). Here is how the above passage (beginning with the phrase "woven of ethereal hues") appeared in the 1843 edition of Criticisms Melville acquired in 1871 (fig. 4): 

Hazlitt’s essay on “The Dulwich Gallery” in Melville’s copy of Criticisms on Art was a reprint of the essay that first appeared in Hazlitt’s Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries of England in 1824. Melville would have first seen Cuyp’s original painting during his visit to the Dulwich Gallery on November 18, 1849, when he used the copy of Hazlitt’s Sketches he had borrowed from a friend in New York as his primary guide to principal galleries of London (NN J 20, 298-99). Bentley’s reproduction of Cuyp’s painting as A Sunny Day in Gems of European Art in 1846 was one measure of the increasing popularity of Cuyp’s paintings in mid-19th-century England. Elizabeth’s gift of that print to Herman in 1887 shows how much Cuyp’s A Sunny Day had come to mean to both of them.  

We have already noted that the “weeds and wildings” in the foreground of Bentley’s print relate well to the poetic collection of Weeds and Wildings whose manuscript Melville dedicated to Lizzie (as “Winnefred”) as he was reaching his own “terminating season.” His dedication to her recalls the time when they lived on their Pittsfield farm forty years earlier, savoring the sweet “flowers of the field,” “those “hardy little creatures of out-of-doors accessible and familiar to every one.” He remembers especially those flowers “sweet in the mouth of that brindled heifer whose breath you so loved to inhale, and doubtless pleasant to her mouth and eye; sweet as well to the like senses in ourselves.” Even more specifically, he recalls those “bright summer mornings of old” when he “came in from my ramble . . . with a handful of these cheap little cheery roses of the meek, newly purloined from the field” (NN BBO 75-76). Of these memories, the print of Cuyp’s A Sunny Day she inscribed to him in 1887 was a living, visible symbol. Its weeds and wildings in the foreground, and even the grass next to the recumbent cow, captured some of the subtle texture that Hazlitt compared to “the down on an unripe nectarine.”  

As D. G. Burnett has noted, this same painting that Hazlitt thought was “the finest Cuyp in the world” was “fiercely criticized” by John Ruskin in Modern Painters I in 1843. With regard to its sunset, Ruskin questioned “how any man calling himself a painter could impose such a thing on the public” (Burnett 377). Having declared that all the skies in the Dulwich Gallery by Claude and Poussin are “systematically wrong,” Ruskin extends the critique quite gleefully to Cuyp, adding an extra swipe at Hazlitt’s “unripe nectarine” comparison (1: 205-207). Ruskin’s criticism of the skies of Claude, Poussin, and Cuyp in Modern Painters I in 1843 is for the purpose of showing Turner’s “Truth of Nature” in contrast to the absolute falseness of these and other Old Masters, whether of the French, or Italian, or Dutch schools. However, as Desmond Shawe-Taylor pointed out in 1999, Cuyp is not only depicting actual natural effects which “go beyond those of his sources Jan Both and Claude,” but his achievement in this way is exactly what made him such an “inspiration” for such a “great nineteenth-century artist” as J. M. W. Turner (176). 

Melville had easy access to the full artillery of the cultural war between Hazlitt and Ruskin after 1870, when he added Hazlitt’s Criticisms on Art to the five-volume set of Ruskin’s Modern Painters he had acquired in 1865 (Sealts, no. 263a and 431). The breadth and comprehensiveness of his print collection shows, over and over, more affinity for Hazlitt’s inspired eclecticism than for Ruskin’s polemic partisanship.