Taylor after Cuyp. Landscape, with Ruins of an Old Tower, Foresters & Dogs.

Like Melville’s copy of Berchem’s Crossing the Ford, his copy of Cuyp’s Landscape, with Ruins of an Old Tower, Foresters & Dogs was engraved for The Royal Gallery of Pictures in 1840. Whereas Cuyp’s A Sunny Day resembles Berchem’s Crossing the Brook by zooming in on the human and animal figures, this Landscape resembles Swanevelt’s Morning and Both’s Woman Mounted on a Mule by encompassing a much broader perspective—though in this case without losing a sense of being in close relation to the figures in the landscape.    

The commentary that accompanies W. J. Taylor’s engraving in the Royal Gallery is entirely justified in calling this spacious landscape “a clear aerial picture, glowing and sparkling, painted with a beautiful harmony of colour, and masterly effect. This is one of the most brilliant specimens of this great master, full of animation, and evincing the most spirited conception and execution, in finish, colour, and perspective.” The text continues with this succinct summary of the scene as depicted: “In a landscape, traversed by a broad clear river, with distant view of a town, and ruins of an old tower, two horsemen are conversing with a shepherd under a group of trees; his daughter, dog, and flock, complete this group. On the brow of a hill, a boor mounted on an ass is quietly riding towards a shepherd and shepherdess tending their flock on the adjoining hill” (6). The painting itself (fig. 1) had long been a favorite for visitors to the Royal Collection at Buckingham Palace. In this painting, as in A Sunny Day, Cuyp has given careful attention to the “weeds and wildings” in the foreground. 

The commentary that accompanied the engraving in The Royal Gallery of Pictures in 1840 ended with a quote from Dr. Gustav Waagen, the expert from Berlin who in mid-century England was considered the leading authority for Dutch paintings in this style: “The careful execution, the astonishing energy of the colouring, the brightness of the tone, approaching to the silvery, which is unusual with Cuyp, and the beautiful composition, make this picture one of the most pleasing by this master” (6). 

Subsequent commentators have continued to see this painting, and the select group of expansive late riverscapes to which it belongs, as the pinnacle of Cuyp’s achievement in the Dutch Italianate landscape style. Stechow, writing in 1966, marvels at Cuyp’s amazing ability to “represent the moist atmosphere of the river, particularly at eventide when it is drenched in gold,” this being the “decisive quality” in paintings such as this. Cuyp could not have achieved such effects without Jan Both, “whose golden atmosphere Cuyp must have studied most carefully.” Yet Cuyp depicted such scenes with “a deeper understanding of classical restraint than Both ever achieved (or aimed at).” Moreover, Cuyp was able to achieve “the same miraculous effects” of luminosity in both Dutch and Italianate scenes (61-62, 161-62). 

Burnett in 1969, White in 1982, and Chong in 1987 also saw this late landscape from Buckingham Palace as representing the height of Cuyp’ s achievement. Burnett, who calls the painting Evening Landscape (1660-65), points to “the virtuosity of the handling of the paint” (fig. 22, p. 380). Christopher White, who named the painting An Evening Landscape with Figures and Sheep (c. 1660), conjectures that the image was inspired by “views of the Rhine, Maas, and Wall” that Cuyp then “incorporated into an imaginary foreground with figures and domestic animals” (cat. no. 35, p. 32). Alan Chong confirmed the latter conjecture by showing a direct source for this riverscape, which he calls Hilly Landscape with Shepherds and Travelers (late 1650s), in a sketch Cuyp made along the Rhine “between Nijmegen and Kleve” in 1651-52. Chong also demonstrated that the “tall trees” and “silhouetted ridge” on the right side of this canvas were borrowed directly from Both’s etching of his own Woman Mounted on Mule”(see our CAT 216, fig. 2). He therefore provides direct evident of Cuyp’s ability to merge Both’s imaginary Italian landscapes with actual Dutch landscape elements, harmonizing the scene with one of Both’s Italianate setting suns (and including a ruined, round tower from Claude or Swanevelt for good measure). Chong is as attentive to the “weeds and wildings” in the foreground as Cuyp and Taylor were in painting and engraving them, noting how the “warm golden sunlight casts long shadows through the scene and gilds the edges of plants in the foreground” (Chong in Sutton, 1987, cat. 24, pp. 300-02, 398).   

One great mystery of Cuyp’s life is that he lived another three decades after painting his magnificent late riverscapes without apparently continuing in his career as a painter. Cundall, writing in Melville’s copy of The Landscape and Pastoral Painters of Holland in 1891, has no sure explanation for this mystery, but he surmises, as had some before him, that Cuyp’s marriage to a wealthy woman in 1659, and his strong interest in political and religious affairs, caused him to abandon his career as a painter. Cundall lamented that in 1891 there was still no full-length monograph on this exceptional painter. But he was able, thanks to other recent scholars, to indicate that Cuyp had been born in 1620, not in 1605 as Houbraken had thought (and as subsequent writers, such as the author of the excellent essay in Works in 1854, had believed). Cundall was also able to report that Cuyp’s father had married four different women and was engaged to a fifth in 1625 (63-63, 68-69).  

The author of the Works essay had been most eager to know whether Aelbert Cuyp had married and had children. Cundall was able to report that Cuyp and his wife Cornelia had had only one child, a daughter Arendina, who had died in 1702, five years after her father and seven years after the death of her only child, so that “with her ended the descendants of Aelbert Cuyp.” From that time on, Aelbert’s name Cuyp would have to live through his art alone, beginning a century after his death, when he began to be appreciated in England as the “Dutch Claude” (Cundall 74, 90-91).  The essay in Works in 1854 was a major step in making Cuyp and his work well known beyond the homes and galleries of British collectors and connoisseurs. The portrait of Cuyp that introduces the essay in Works (fig. 2) was one of a very few images that purported to represent this artist, and even today his visual identity is uncertain.  

Cundall in his 1891 book provided a very detailed account of the current location of 203 of the 327 paintings that Cuyp was known to have created, each identified by the nation, city, museum, gallery, or private collection in which it was currently being preserved. There were still relatively few in public or private European collections, even in the Netherlands. Of the 203 paintings Cundall inventoried, 144 were still in Great Britain, the next most numerous being in Holland (19), Germany (13), France (9), and Russia (6). Individual paintings listed by Cundall in museums Melville had visited in England and Europe included 13 Cuyps at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, 10 at London’s National Gallery, 6 at the Louvre, and 6 at the Rijksmuseum (159-167). Melville could also have seen two paintings attributed to Cuyp at the Metropolitan Museum in New York beginning in May 1890.    

The first work ever to enter the Museum’s permanent collection as a painting by Cuyp in Melville’s lifetime was Landscape with Cattle (fig. 3). Another gift from Henry G. Marquand, it was exhibited in the New Eastern Gallery O beginning on May 5, 1890. For Melville, this painting would have been a welcome supplement to his print after Cuyp’s A Sunny Day. 

The description of this work in the October 1905 issue of the Museum’s Catalog of Paintings emphasized the combination of detailed figurative depiction and atmospheric coloristic effects for which Cuyp’s paintings were now becoming highly valued in New York. “In the immediate foreground, beneath a glowing sunset sky, a large group of cattle is watched over by a cowherd and his dog, both stretched out upon the meadow grass near by. At the right, and beyond, a man is leading a horse, and a soldier stands watching some fishermen drag their net upon the bank of the stream on which there are two boats, one with the sail spread. Upon the opposite bank are two mansions. At the left of the spectator the river fades away and there are vapory indications of a distant town near the horizon” (no. 260, p. 33). In 1905, the “vapory indications of a distant town near the horizon” on the left would have reminded some New Yorkers of the French impressionist paintings beginning to infiltrate the city. The Museum website today, while attributing the painting to Jacob van Strij, a very “capable” Cuyp imitator, notes that “this impressive panel bears the signature of Aelbert Cuyp, and until recently was never doubted as his work” (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437760). 

After Landscape with Cattle had arrived as a Cuyp in New Western Gallery O in May 1890, Cuyp’s Artist sketching from Nature arrived as one of twelve paintings on loan from Mrs. Henry Havemeyer in the Old Eastern Gallery in November 1890. The loan was renewed from May 1891 until November 1891 (Hand-Book no. 6; no. 14, no 2). This painting was not only on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum during the last year of Melville’s life; it was listed in Melville’s copy of Cundall’s 1891 book as the only painting by Cuyp to have entered an American collection. Cundall’s sole American entry read: “United States. New York. Museum,  An Artist Sketching from Nature [Cope Coll]. Replica of the picture formerly in the Secrétan Coll.” (p. 166). Immediately below is an 1875 etching by Gustave Greux after Cuyp’s Cuyp dessinant d’après nature (Cuyp Sketching from nature) that was sold from the Eugène Secrétan Collection in Paris in July 1889 (figure 4).  

In 1882, seven years after the French journal L’Art published the above etching after Cuyp, the same journal published the etching by Greux of Watteau’s L’Île Enchantée that Melville’s acquired for his own print collection (our CAT 159).

The painting by Cuyp from which Greux made his etching was no. 107 in the Catalogue of the Celebrated Collection of Paintings . . . formed by Mr. E. Secrétan that was sold at Sedelmeyer Galleries in Paris in July 1889. This catalog entry, unlike many others, did not include an illustration of the painting itself. But the text for No. 107 corresponds well to the etching by Greux: “An artist, supposed to be Alb. Cuyp, seated on a stone, seen from behind, is sketching a landscape. His valet, standing to his left, leaning on a cane, holds the horses by the bridle. Before them, a flat, far-stretching country. On the right, a hillock, with some houses on it; the sea in the background. A fine, precious painting, admirable harmony of tone” (p. 111). That description applies equally well to Cuyp’s Sketching from Nature that arrived in the Old Eastern Gallery Y as a loan from Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer in November 1890 (fig. 5): 

Henry O. Havemeyer had purchased Cuyp’s Sketching from Nature directly from the Secrétan/Sedelmeyer sale in Paris in July 1889. Arriving in Old Eastern Gallery Y as a loan from Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer in November 1890, this painting was a wonderful supplement to the Landscape with Cattle that Henry G. Marquand had installed in the New Eastern Gallery O in May 1890 as the first painting by Cuyp to enter the museum’s permanent collection. After the Havemeyers withdrew the twelve paintings they had loaned to the Museum as a potential donation, most of them, including 5 Rembrandts, returned in the Havemeyer Bequest of 1929. Cuyp’s Sketching from Nature, however, stayed in the possession of their son Horace, who donated it to the Brooklyn Museum, as Cuyp’s Artist Designing after Nature, in 1956 (“Annual Report,” p. 14). The attribution of that painting to Abraham van Calraet, like that of Landscape with Cattle to Jacob van Strij, came nearly a century after each painting had arrived at the Metropolitan Museum in 1890. Today the first fully authenticated painting by Cuyp to have entered the permanent collection of the Museum is considered to be Young Herdsmen with Cows, donated by Benjamin Altman in 1913. 

Melville had seen many paintings by Cuyp in London and Paris in 1849 and in the Netherlands in 1857, but to have two paintings attributed to this Dutch master arrive at the Metropolitan Museum in 1890 would have been a special pleasure. As a print collector, he could compare the depiction of two cattle on the edge of a ridge in the copy of Bentley’s engraving of A Sunny Day his wife Lizzie had given him in 1887 with the depiction of a larger group of cattle near the edge of a river in the painting of Landscape with Cattle that Marquand gave to the Museum in 1890. And he could compare the expansive view of the Dutch landscape in his copy of Taylor’s engraving of Landscape, with Ruins of an Old Tower, Foresters & Dogs with the even more expansive landscape view in the painting of Sketching from Nature that Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer loaned to the Museum in 1890. Melville could also compare the two newly arrived paintings with the engravings after Cuyp in the copy of The Works of Eminent Masters he acquired in 1871 as well as with those in the chapter devoted to Cuyp in the copy of Cundall’s The Landscape and Pastoral Painters of Holland he acquired in 1891. As an image of an artist on a ridge surveying a broad, flat Dutch landscape, the newly arrived loan of Sketching from Nature from the Havemeyer collection was a perfect counterpoint to the engraving after Berchem’s Conversation on a Journey reproduced in Melville’s copy of The Works of  Eminent Masters (see our CAT 217, fig. 3.) 

The painting from which Taylor engraved Melville’s copy of Landscape, with Ruins of an Old Tower, Foresters & Dogs appeared Cundall’s 1891 catalog of Cuyp’s paintings as “Landscape—Evening” (163). Like Berchem’s Crossing the Ford, this late riverscape by Cuyp had been acquired by King George IV in 1814. Anna Jameson briefly described each work in her Companion to the Most Celebrated Private Galleries in London in 1844. Jameson introduced Cuyp himself as “a landscape painter of consummate ability, and the truest, purest feeling for nature. To come upon one of Cuyp’s pictures after looking at Bergheim and Both, is like opening a door and stepping out into the fresh air—into heaven’s own light and earth’s own verdure. It was not till a century after his death that he began to be appreciated in his own country or known out of it, and it should seem that he rather painted for love of his art, than lived for the practice of it” (17-18). In such a spirit did Herman Melville live, as a writer of poetry and collector of prints, during the closing decades of his life.