T. Jeavons after Meindert Hobbema. The Water Mill

In contrast to Ruisdael’s virtuoso range of subjects, Meindert Hobbema (1638-1709) gave virtuoso attention to a narrow range of subjects, the most persistent of which was the water mill, whose motif he borrowed Ruisdael’s The Water Mill of 1661. The painting at Buckingham Palace that Jeavons engraved in 1839 is one of thirty water mills that Hobbema is known to have painted. It is described in the accompanying letterpress as “A brilliant picture of this rare master, full of natural effect, embodying, to an extraordinary degree, the excellences of his style,--pure and chaste tinting of colour, full and flowing richness of pencil, and the most consummate knowledge of chiaroscuro. The water-mill occupies, with its millstream, the one side of the picture, the other is taken up with a richly wooded country” (20; see fig. 1).  

The same painting was engraved by J. Cousen as The Old Mill for Hall’s The Royal Gallery of Art in 1854. The engraving by Cousen was also published four years later in The Art-Journal (fig. 2 below); its commentator speculated that Hobbema must have been close to Ruisdael at the time he made this painting (p. 258). By 1982, when White cataloged the original painting as A Water Mill Beside a Woody Lane and dated it 1665 or 1668, he was able to declare that this painting was based on the water mill at Deventer that Ruisdael had painted in 1661, that Hobbema had painted in 1662, and that Hobbema had painted again, in this version, a few years later (50-51). It is interesting to compare the 1839 Jeavons engraving and the 1854 Cousen engraving against the original painting—and also to contrast them against each other. The two engravers distributed the light and shade differently, with Cousen creating sharper contrasts, Jeavons more of a muted effect. Cousens, working at a later stage in the evolution of steel engraving, conveys more of the detail and the texture in the figures, buildings, and reflections. 

Hobbema appears to have been little known in his lifetime, as he is unmentioned among Houbraken’s constellation of Dutch painters. His paintings were rarely engraved in Europe before the nineteenth century, when English collectors began to treat him as a major Dutch painter. Jeavons’s 1839 engraving of The Water Mill captures the quaint, calm charm for which Hobbema was suddenly being appreciated, the flowing water on the one side of the painting and the twisty trees on the other side lending controlled animation to an inhabited landscape bathing in expansive repose. That Cousen could publish another new engraving after the same painting in 1854, itself re-published in The Art-Journal in 1858, demonstrates the increased popularity of Hobbema’s pastoral landscapes in the face of the rapid industrialization of mid-nineteenth-century England.  

In 1824, William Hazlitt had famously promoted Hobbema to Old Master status in the essay on “The Dulwich Gallery” in his Sketches of the Principal Galleries of England. That essay was reprinted in the 1843 edition of Hazlitt’s Criticisms on Art that Melville acquired in 1871. Hazlitt was especially impressed with Hobbema’s Water-Mill in the Dulwich Collection, a painting “with the wheels in motion, and the ducks padding in the restless stream” (fig. 3).  

After having bestowed his highest possible praise on Rembrandt’s painting of Jacob’s Dream, Hazlitt asks, rhetorically, “Is this not a anti-climax, from Jabob’s Dream to a picture of a Water-Mill?” He answers, earnestly, “We do not know, and we should care as little, could we but paint either of the pictures.” For Hazlitt, “if a picture is admirable in its kind, we do not give ourselves much trouble about the subject. Could we paint as well as Hobbema, we should not envy Rembrandt; nay, even as it is, while we can relish both, we envy neither” (29). 

John Ruskin, of course, was as dismissive of Hobbema as he was of Cuyp. In the five-volume edition of Modern Painters that Melville acquired in 1865, Ruskin had this to say about the same Water-Mill at the Dulwich Gallery that Hazlitt had praised so highly: “A single dusty roll of Turner’s brush is more truly expressive of the infinitude of foliage than the niggling of Hobbima could have rendered his canvas, if he had worked on it till domesday” (Ruskin 5: 39-41; Cundall 53). That Melville’s collection was as rich in engravings after Dutch realist paintings and Claude’s idealist paintings as it was in those after Turner shows his eclectic flexibility with regard to the disputes that roiled nineteenth-century English art criticism.  

Melville had a convenient sampling of English and Continental commentary on Hobbema in the copy of Cundall’s Landscape and Pastoral Painters of Holland that he acquired in 1891. Cundall, after citing Ruskin’s dismissive comments on Hobbema, explored the “relative merits” of Hobbema and Ruisdael with generous “side by side” quotations from “Kugler, Hćris, Scheltema, Michel, and Woltmann and Woermann” on the “relative merits” of Hobbema and Ruisdael (59-62). One of the four engravings after Hobbema in Cundall’s book reproduces The Water Mill from Buckingham Palace that Melville owned in the Jeavons engraving (fig. 4). 

 Another engraving in the Hobbema chapter reproduces The Avenue, Middelharnis, from the painting London’s National Gallery (fig. 5  below). This painting was already widely considered to be “Hobbema’s best work” even though it appears to date from 1689, when his artistry was thought to be in decline (38, 49, 53). Melville could not have seen this remarkable painting in person, as it had not been purchased by the National Gallery until 1871, fourteen years after his second and last visit to the principal galleries of London (NN J, 128, 527). He would have seen it in 1891—in the full page reproduction that introduced the chapter on Hobbema in the book he acquired by Cundall (facing p. 39). 

Cundall’s loosely organized chapter on Hobbema contains biographical information certain to have been of interest to Melville late in life. In 1668, during the decade of his peak creativity, Hobbema married, accepted a position at the Amsterdam custom house, and made relatively few paintings during the last thirty-one years of his life. At the custom house he was appointed “gauger for the town,” his job being to “re-measure” foreign liquids such as wines and oils “according to the measures of capacity then used in Holland.” Cundall imagines that “Hobbema’s duties as gauger doubtless took up a large portion of his time,” since “from the date when he received the nomination his paintings become scarce” (42-43). He imagines, too, that “the post of gauger was not a lucrative one” since, “when he died in December, 1709,” Hobbema was “interred in a pauper’s grave.” He had then been “living in Rosengracht (Rose Canal), in a house directly opposite to that in which Rembrandt had died forty years previously” (45).

Hobbema not only “outlived his great contemporaries in painting”; he had “remained long enough to see the decadence of art in Holland. His works were little thought of during his lifetime or even during the succeeding generation. No mention is made of his name in any sale catalogue until 1735 (twenty-six years after his death)” (45-47).  Melville’s own journey from custom house inspector to resurrected artist was to take equally long. In Cundall’s final summation, Ruisdael “makes us admire his representation of nature,” whereas “Hobbema compels our love.  His pictures are full of contentment and peace, and well typify the quiet Dutch character” (51). 

Melville would have seen his first authentic painting by Hobbema during his visit to London as a young man in 1849. He did not record a visit to the Royal Collection at Buckingham Palace, home of The Water-Mill he acquired in the engraving by Jeavons that is the subject of this essay. But he did visit the Dulwich Picture Gallery, one of whose three paintings by Hobbema was the Water-Mill so highly praised by Hazlitt in the 1843 edition of Criticisms of Art that Melville was to acquire in 1871 (no. 31; our fig. 3). Melville made three visits to London’s National Gallery in 1849, and one visit to the Louvre in Paris, but neither of those museums had as yet acquired a painting by Hobbema. Cundall listed eight Hobbemas at the National Gallery in 1891, but they had all arrived between 1862 and 1875. The Water-Mill was one of two paintings by Hobbema Cundall listed for the Louvre in 1891, but it had not arrived until 1861. The situation was similar when Melville visited Amsterdam in 1857; Cundall lists three paintings by Hobbema at the Rijksmuseum in 1891, two of which were Water-Mills, but the earliest one, a beautiful companion to the one at the Dulwich Gallery, had not arrived until 1871 (Cundall, 155-58). 

In 1871, when some of the leading European museums were only beginning to acquire paintings by Hobbema, the founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York purchased a Hobbema landscape as part of the “Original Purchase” that established its collection. The entry for Hobbema’s A View in Holland in the catalog for the Museum’s Inaugural Exhibition in 1872 openly expressed pride in having acquired this painting from its previous European owners (fig. 6):

Hobbema’s A View in Holland drew considerable attention from Henry James in his review of the Inaugural Exhibition in 1872. James considered the small painting of “a road through a wood” (no. 53, p. 29) to be “pleasing but not brilliant.” James rated Hobbema second only to Ruisdael in Dutch landscape painting. "A discrete and chastened grasp of local verisimilitude is his peculiar characteristic. This is achieved in the present case with a notably small expenditure of color. It is a very sober view of nature, though not without a hint of poetry. The little subject is sad,--sad as some sunless hour of the world’s youth” (762).

One wonders what the elderly Melville might have thought or felt in 1891 about the early Hobbema landscape that had struck young Henry James as “sad as some sunless hour of the world’s youth” in 1872. If Melville had visited the Old Eastern Gallery X any time between November 1890 and his death in September 1891, he would have seen the same painting of A View in Holland that the Museum acquired in its original purchase in 1871. (In the Museum’s Hand-Book No. 6 for November 1990, A View in Holland is listed as no. 81, near no. 79, the painting of Heraclitus and Democritus by Jacob Jordaens that had been donated to the Museum by Herman’s sister-in-law Jane Melville in 1884, CAT 199 INT; Fig. 1). The only image I have so far found of A View in Holland is the small black-and-white thumbnail that appeared in an appendix to Katharine Baetjer’s 2004 essay on “The Founding Purchase of 1871” (fig. 7 below; Baetjer, no. 53 in Appendix 1, Part B).