Potter's Cattle in Melville's Book Collection

Melville never saw this famous painting in person, but he had two reproductions of it in his own home. One is the engraving immediately below, illustrating the discussion of The Young Bull in Melville’s 1854 edition of The Works of Eminent Masters (fig. 6). The engraving differs from the painting in three obvious ways: its lack of color, its reversal of the image from left to right, and its relatively small size. Yet it does convey much of the painting itself quite effectively: the shape and stance of the bull, the comforting presence of the shepherd, the pictorial cohesion of the companion creatures, and the angular rise of the foreground against the depth of the flat, receding landscape across to the edge of the town.

The author of the essay in Works, who had seen the original painting from which the engraving was made, declared that “within the limits of his special subject” Potter surpassed any other painter. “Not only does he thoroughly know his animals, their anatomy, their habits, their character; but no one has so carefully observed the gait which this character gives them, the movement or posture which betrays agitation or calmness in them.” In this case, however, the mere size of such a commonplace creature left the writer cold; he much preferred Potter’s smaller paintings and etched engravings of cattle (1: 405-07). 

Melville acquired his second reproduction of Potter’s Young Bull in the last year of his life, in the full-page illustration that introduced the chapter on Potter in his copy of Cundall’s The Landscape and Pastoral Painters of Holland, published in 1891. Book illustration had become much more versatile by the end of the century, and this reproduction, preserving the left-to-right perspective of the original painting, has more of the immediacy of an etching, enhancing the contrasts between light and dark and between figure and ground while also making sharper distinctions among the six living figures in the foreground, those grazing in the distant pasture, and the one gliding overhead (fig. 7).

Cundall calls the young bull “celebrated but overrated,” even though it was widely considered to be Potter's masterpiece. Cundall allows that “the bull is magnificently drawn, and that the other animals display great truth to nature,” but “the great fault of the picture is its very size, which is all out of proportion to the object being represented.” This Young Bull, therefore, “gains by a reduction” to the size of “an engraving or photograph.” For these reasons, Cundall considers Potter’s depiction of this bull on such a large canvas to be “correct but not well chosen.” And he quotes this even more severe judgment by a commentator in 1857 (the year Melville was admiring the Bear-Hunt in Amsterdam): “the portrait of a young bull ruminating hung against the walls of a room is inadmissible as a painting” (Cundall 124-25).  

One expects that Melville, the former farmer, would have enjoyed Potter’s Young Bull somewhat more than Cundall did. When Cundall published the above reproduction in 1891, Melville was still revising “At the Hostelry,” his poetic colloquy among Old Master painters about the pictorial picturesque. In “To Winnefred,” the draft of his dedication of that ambitious poem to his wife Elizabath, Herman recalled the pleasure they had shared on their farm in Pittsfield forty years earlier when watching their “brindled heifer” munching on Red Clover, savoring its sweet smell (NN BBO 75).

Melville knew from his 1854 copy of Works and his 1891 copy of Cundall that some authorities considered Potter’s etchings of cattle even more successful than his paintings. Cundall in his appendix listed twenty-three etchings of horses or cattle by Potter that Amand-Durand had published in Paris in 1875, two of which he reproduced in his chapter on Potter (132-37, 171-72).  

Melville had direct access to a third etching by Potter in the copy of The Wonders of Engraving by George Duplessis that he acquired in 1875. Duplessis was the leading authority on Old Master engravings in the late 19th century, and he had supplied the text for Amand-Durand’s facsimile edition of Eaux-Fortes de Paul Potter. From those etchings, Duplessis chose Two Cows seen from Behind (our fig. 8 immediately below) to represent Potter’s artistry in his book. Duplessis in his commentary considered Paul Potter to be “the most distinguished” of all Dutch artists in “the representation of animals in all their beauty and nobility. . . . He idealized his models his model without compromising truth” (101-02). 

Although the Metropolitan Museum does not appear to have acquired any paintings by Potter by the time of Melville's death in 1891, Melville did have plenty of information in his own home to supplement the engraving after Potter’s The Shooting Ponies that he had acquired while building his private print collection. Melville had considerable information about Potter’s life and career in the copies of The Works of Eminent Masters he acquired in 1871, The Wonders of Engraving he acquired in 1875, and The Landscape and Pastoral Painters of Holland he acquired in 1891. This sequence of books also showed the increasing sophistication of the discipline of art history in charting the pictorial evolution of artists such as Cuyp, Ruisdael, Hobbema, and Potter while also expanding the techniques by which their works could be reproduced in the increasing array of books and magazines devoted to visual art. 

The text, the illustrations, and the appendix in the chapter Paul Potter in Cundall’s 1891 book all benefitted greatly from the biographical research, the art historical consolidation, and the archival documentation that had taken place since the publication of The Works of Eminent Masters in 1854. One element of that evolution can be seen by contrasting the text, interpretation, and documentation of Potter’s Young Bull in Melville’s copy of Works (CAT 223, fig. 6) with those same elements in Melville’s copy of the chapter on Potter that Cundall published more than three decades later (CAT 223, fig. 7). Another element of that evolution can be seen by the engraved portrait that introduces the essay on Potter in Melville’s copy of Works (CAT 223, fig. 1) with the one that Cundall published as the frontispiece for his entire book on Cuyp, Ruisdael, Hobbema, and Potter (fig. 9 below). Each reproduction is based on the portrait that Bartholemeus van der Helst painted shortly before Potter’s death at age 29. The version in Works is an evocative partial portrait in reverse; Cundall’s frontispiece shows a young painter turning awkwardly toward us from an uncomfortable chair, away from a canvas waiting to be painted, his left hand gripping the palette and brushes with which he will paint as long as he lives.