Seeing Ruisdael's Water and Imagination Wedded Together

The expanding interconnections between the Old Master prints Melville was collecting, and the art library he was assembling, during the last two decades of his life would have revived his memory of paintings by the same Old Masters he had seen in the galleries of London and the Continent in 1849 and 1857. Those memories would have been further enriched by any original paintings by those same Old Masters he might have seen at New York’s Metropolitan of Art after its Inaugural Exhibition in 1972. Most of the Dutch and Flemish artists in his print collection whose paintings he had seen in the galleries of England and the Continent had also been exhibited in the expanding galleries of the Metropolitan Museum by the time he died in 1891. Here we will take a quick look at a few of Ruisdael’s paintings of water Melville could have seen during his visits to galleries in London, Paris, and New York.

Ishmael claims that “meditation and water are wedded forever” in the opening pages of Moby-Dick, the first book Melville published after having visited the principal galleries of London and Paris late in 1849. “In some high land of lakes,” says Ishmael, “let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water be in all that region” (NN MD 4). Ruisdael’s A Waterfall (fig. 6) is one of the “gems” his own feet could have led him to at the Dulwich Picture Gallery on November 17, 1849 (NN J 19-20, 298-99):

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Figure 6. Jacob van Ruisdael. A Waterfall, oil on canvas, late 1660s. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London. Visted by Melville on November 17, 1849.

Two weeks after Melville’s visit to the Dulwich Picture Gallery, he spent a day among “the heaps of treasures of all sorts” at the Louvre in Paris (NN J 31). There the controlled turbulence of Ruisdael’s rock-bound Waterfall at Dulwich would have been supplanted by the uncontrolled turbulence of Ruisdael’s lee-shore Breakwater at the Louvre (fig. 7). Not until Melville encountered J. M. W. Turner’s Calais Pier and Snow-Storm Sea-Port at London’s National Gallery in April 1857 would he see seen such a harrowing depiction of the perils of the lee-shore as he had described them in Moby-Dick (NN J 128; MD 106-07). Melville later acquired steel engravings of each of those Turner seascapes (CAT nos. to be assigned).

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Figure 7. Jacob van Ruisdael, The Breakwater, oil on canvas, 1670-72. The Louvre.

Turner’s affinity for seascapes by Ruisdael was well known long before Melville could have seen the above painting at the Louvre in 1849. Turner had seen the same painting at the Louvre in 1802, and it had directly inspired the lee-shore painting of Calais Pier that Turner exhibited in 1803 and Melville was to acquire in an 1859 engraving.

Turner’s most explicit tribute to Ruisdael—and to the painting he had seen at the Louvre in 1802—was Port Ruysdael, the fictional name he gave to the lee-shore painting he exhibited in 1827 (fig. 8). In this painting Turner rotated Ruisdael’s sidelong view of the breakwater directly out into what Ishmael was to describe as the “howling infinite” of the lee shore in Moby-Dick (NN MD 106-07).

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Figure 8. J. M. W. Turner. Port Ruisdael, oil on canvas, 1827. Yale Center for British Art.

John Ruskin was highly dismissive of most Dutch paintings in the five-volume edition of Modern Painters that Melville acquired in 1865, but he did acknowledge that “the sea-piece of Ruysdael in the Louvre . . . is at least forceful, agreeable, and as far as it goes, natural; the waves have much freedom of action, and power of color; the wind blows hard over the shore, and the whole picture may be studied with profit” (1: 340). [check 1860-62 edition for paging]

Ruisdael’s waterfalls, like his lee-shore storms, influenced Turner, as Melville would have known from the 1854 edition of The Works of Eminent Masters he acquired in 1871. Side-by-side essays on Ruisdael and Turner frame full-page illustrations of Ruisdael’s The Waterfall and Turner’s Cascade de Terni (Works, 1: 15-16). Ruisdael’s The Waterfall (figure 9) was strongly influenced by Scandanavian waterfalls then being painted by his Amsterdam colleague Allart van Everdingen. The resemblance is easily seen in the engraving after van Everdingen’s Waterfall in Melville’s print collection (CAT no. 224). Melville would have known from the appendix to his copy of Cundall that this Ruisdael Waterfall (distinguishable by castle on the crown of the mountain and the cottage over the falls) was at the Cassell Gallery in Germany (148).

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Figure 9. “The Waterfall. By Jacob Ruisdael” (juxtaposed with Turner’s Cascade de Terni) in Melville’s copy of The Works of Eminent Masters. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

After seeing paintings by Ruisdael in London and Paris in 1849, engravings after Ruisdael in the copies of Works and Wonders he acquired in the early 1870s, and acquiring his own etching after Ruisdael’s Trees at the Edge of a River, with Two Men in a Rowboat, Melville must have been happy when the Metropolitan Museum acquired its first painting by Ruisdael for its permanent collection in 1889. The Forest Stream (fig. 10) first arrived at the Museum as part of a Loan Exhibition from the Sedelmeyer Collection in Paris in 1886, in the first year of Melville’s retirement from the Custom House (no. 19, Forest Stream). The painting remained at the Museum for the Inaugural Exhibition of the new addition to the building in 1888-89 (no. 27, as Landscape), after which it was officially acquired as part of the Marquand Collection shown in New Eastern Gallery O (no. 27, as Landscape).

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Figure 10. Jacob van Ruisdael. The Forest Stream, oil on canvas, ca. 1660. Acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a gift from Henry G. Marquand in 1889.

This large, expansive, gracious painting (39 by 51 in.) lacks the overt drama of Ruisdael’s most turbulent waterfall and lee-shore scenes. The Forest Stream probably derives from Ruisdael’s excursion through the eastern provinces of Westphalia with colleague Nicholaes Berchem in 1650. The easy flow of the water of the calm stream over the rocks into the soft ripples below may well have felt soothing to Melville in the last few years of his life. It might have reminded him of the four mountain streams that merge to form the Housatonic River in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, quietly flowing near the Arrowhead home into which Melville and his family moved while he was writing Moby-Dick in 1850. It might also have reminded him of this passage from the paragraph in which Ishmael declares that “meditation and water are wedded forever”: “Say, you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in a stream” (NN MD 4). The name Housatonic derives from the Mohican phrase for “river of the mountain place.”