Etching after drawing by Jacob van Ruisdael. Trees at the Edge of a River, with Two Men in a Rowboat

Like Cuyp, Jacob van Ruisdael (c. 1629-1682), was a master of all that he touched: from the most famous wheatfield in Golden Age Dutch painting, to the most splendid waterfalls, to the strongest oak trees, to the unparalleled Jewish cemetery, to the purest depiction of ocean storm, to the most original images of water mills and windmills (until his student Hobbema and colleague Rembrandt came to meet him on his own ground).   

Melville’s one engraving after Ruisdael is one of four prints that were not exhibited at the Osborne Collection at Southwestern University in 1985 because of unsightly stains and heavy foxing that had bloomed all over the image itself. After restoration sponsored by Melville’s great-great grandson Duncan Osborne, the print has been restored and the heaviest stains removed. Like Claude’s Harbour Scene with a Grand Tower (our CAT 121), this image was presented as an etching by the original artist in McCreery’s Collection of Original Etchings in 1816. To learn that fact, I had to discover the source of the foxy image in the Osborne collection  (whose only verbal inscription was the name of the artist) in Ruisdael’s oeuvre. This did not prove as easy as I had hoped. The image did not match up against any of the etchings Ruisdael was known to have created. Nor did it match any of his known paintings. The etching derives from a watercolor in black chalk that had been essentially unknown until the National Gallery in Washington acquired it in 1980 and Seymour Slive reproduced it in 1981 (Slive and Hoetink, no. 68; Slive 2001, D 124).   

Slive described the drawing itself as a “remarkably fresh sketch. . . . Its concentration on the motif of a large tree, emphasis on structural accents, great spatial clarity, and suggestive strokes that sum up large areas of the landscape with a few economic touches place it about 1655.” Slive mentioned that he had seen an “anonymous etched copy, in reverse,” in the British Museum’s copy of McCreery’s 1816 Collection of Original Etchings. Melville’s print now in Texas corresponds exactly to the etching published by McCreery, as a Ruisdael, in 1816 (179). In a subsequent essay on Ruisdael’s etchings and drawings, Slive suggested that image that McCreery attributes to Ruisdael was in fact etched by Samuel Woodburn, an English art dealer contemporary with McCreery, who appears to have made an etching after another black chalk drawing by Ruisdael that is inscribed with the initials “S. W.” (“Additions to Jacob Ruisdael,” 604, 606). Melville would have known from multiple sources that Ruisdael had created etchings as well as drawings and paintings, so he is likely to have thought that his etching was by Ruisdael himself (especially if he knew of its origin, and that of his etching by Claude, in McCreery’s Collection of Original Etchings). With this etching, as with that by Claude, he must have felt that he was very close to the eye and the hand of the artist. 

Melville had considerable information about Ruisdael’s life and career in his personal library. His copy of the 1854 edition of The Works of the Eminent Masters included one substantial essay (with five engraved illustrations) devoted to Ruisdael’s entire career and another featuring “Ruisdael’s Waterfall.” The opening chapter of Cundall’s Landscape and Pastoral Painters of Holland, published in 1891 and incorporating recent scholarship by Dutch scholars, provided new information about Ruisdael’s life and career. That essay was illustrated with engravings after four paintings, one drawing, and one etching, these being supplemented by a comprehensive list of paintings and etchings by Ruisdael, though not his drawings (145-54).  

Melville’s etching of Ruisdael’s Trees at the Edge of a River provides a fine example of the relation between the prints Melville collected and the books he collected. Here is an engraving after a painting by Ruisdeal in the copy of The Works of Eminent Masters that Melville acquired in 1871 (fig. 2): 

Here, as in Melville’s etching, we have two men in a row boat near trees on the edge of the shore.  The large angular oak in the foreground dominates the image, dwarfing the man who is leaning way out on its lower limb to fish in the water below him while two cattle anchor the slope of the  oak with their motionless bodies. 

The tall sturdy oaks that anchor the etching in Melville’s print collection and the engraving in his book collection also illustrate a deep affinity between the images he collected and the words he wrote. We see this in Pierre, the autographical novel he published two years after returning to New York from his first exposure to Old Master paintings in the principal galleries of London and Paris. Melville reveals his own eye for the expressiveness of a lone, powerful tree near a watery shore during the meditative moment in which Pierre “wandered away in reveries down to the river bank. Here one primeval pine-tree had been luckily left standing by the otherwise unsparing woodman . . .  . At its half-bared roots of sadness, Pierre sat down, and marked the mighty bulk and far out-reaching lengths of one particular root, which, straying down the bank, the storms and rains had years ago exposed. ‘How wide, how strong these roots must spread!’” (NN P 40). 

The essay on Ruisdael in Melville’s copy of Works presents this artist as “the painter of nature’s elegies and the poet of souls tried by sorrow. He seeks out the most mysterious solitude, the most hidden recesses” (2: 114). In such places Ruisdael found his own pictorial correlative to Pierre’s “half-bared roots of sadness.” This theme pervades the Works essay was much as it does the image of the artist that introduces it (fig. 3):  

In medium as well as in subject, Melville’s etching of two men in a small boat near a shoreline after Ruisdael relates closely to his copy of Jourbet’s etching of a small boat on a lake after Claude Lorrain (CAT 133). When Melville’s copy of Works was published in 1854, only three or four copies of Ruisdael’s own etchings had been known. By the time Melville’s copy of The Wonders of Engraving was published in 1871, its author, Georges Duplessis was in the process of creating a facsimile edition of all twelve of Ruisdael’s then known etchings. Duplessis in Wonders calls Ruisdael “the greatest landscape painter of Holland.” He considers some of his engravings to be “quite equal to his pictures. His style is easy, his drawing skillful and decided; his is pre-eminently successful in rendering trees and foliage; his work is always clear and distinct” (106).  In support of this statement, Duplessis reproduced Ruisdael’s etching of The Corn Field (fig. 4).   

Among Ruisdael’s etchings, Duplessis considered A Corn Field to be “unrivalled” as an illustration of the artist’s “great and noble genius. . . . A simple corn-field is shut in by tall trees; the leafy boughs, the tangled shrubs, the gentle breeze, the tender light, even the refreshing fragrance of the country, are all happily and clearly rendered” (109). In 1818 the English landscape painter John Constable copied this etching meticulously in pen and ink, initiating a lifelong identification with Ruisdael as a landscape artist (Slive, 1981, 248-49). 

In 1798, twenty years before copying The Corn Field in pen and ink, young Constable had first indicated his wish to copy a Ruisdael etching. In 1822, after Constable lost an election at the Royal Academy, his friend Archdeacon Fisher consoled him with these words: “You are painting for a name to be remembered hereafter; for the time when men shall talk of Wilson &Vanderneer & Ruisdale & Constable in the same breath.” When Fisher himself died in 1832, Constable made a copy of Ruisdael’s Winter Landscape as an act of mourning, one of four Ruisdael copies and three Ruisdael originals “in his possession at the time of his death in 1837” (Slive, 248-49, fig. 90).  Melville’s etching of Ruisdael’s Corn Field in Duplessis, and his own copy of Ruisdael’s Trees at the Edge of the River, were fit companions to the prints Melville was to acquire after Constable’s The Hay Wain and The Valley Stream (CAT nos. to be assigned).  

Constable was not the only English landscape painter in Melville’s print collection to be directly influenced by one of Ruisdael’s etchings. Melville’s engraving after Thomas Gainsborough’s The Gipsies features a large and sturdy oak at the center of the image (CAT no. to be assigned). The Gipsies is one of several Gainsboroughs that were directly influenced by Ruisdael’s The Great Oak of 1652 and other woodland etchings, one of which young Gainsborough had copied directly in black chalk (Slive and Hoetink, 14, figs. 1 and 2).  

The chapter on Ruisdael in Melville’s copy of Cundall’s The Landscape and Pastoral Painters of Holland, published in the last year of Melville’s life, included an appendix listing twelve of the thirteen etchings that are now known today (including The Great Beech and The Three Oaks). Cundall’s list derived from the facsimile edition that Duplessis had published in 1878 (some images known from only a single surviving sheet). The one etching in Cundall’s chapter on Ruisdael, The Field Bordered by Trees, was a “facsimile reduction” of The Corn Field that Duplessis had published in Melville’s copy of The Wonders of Engraving.  

Another illustration in Cundall's chapter features a truncated tree the foreground that dwarfs the figures beneath it as much as does the one in Melville’s etching of Trees at the Edge of a River or the tree by the lake in his copy of Works. Melville in Cundall’s caption to Ruisdael’s The Forest (fig. 5) would have been interested to see that its figures were by Berchem. 

Slive in 1981 wondered why Ruisdael, one of the “most creative printmakers of his day,” abandoned the technique of etching so soon after he had mastered it. “Why did he not make etchings for the large Amsterdam market? . . . Perhaps he decided soon after 1655 that the results of the time and energy spent on polishing metal plates, sharpening needles, mixing grounds, preparing mordants needed to bite plates, messing with printer’s ink, and finally struggling with the presses and other etcher’s paraphernalia were simply not work the effort involved.”  Whatever the cause of this cessation, one result is that “no print room has a full set of his thirteen prints,” with five of those etchings existing “only in unique impressions” (232, 235-36). 

The large Manchester exhibition of 1857 (a city Melville passed through on the way home from the Mediterranean in April 1857) was the first major exhibition of Ruisdael’s work in England that included a few drawings and etchings along with the better-known paintings. The exhibition at the Mauritshuis and Harvard University that Slide and Hoetink curated in 1981-82 (which included the original drawing from which Melville’s etching was made) was the first ever to attempt a comprehensive overview of the artist's entire output. This is another way in which a print from Melville’s collection has come to have considerably more meaning (and art-historical value) than it might have been thought to have at the time he collected it.