William Woollett and B. T. Pouncy after Herman van Swanevelt. Morning

Swanevelt’s Morning and Evening were two of William Woollett’s last engravings; his widow Elizabeth published them as a pair in 1787, two years after his death. Comparing these two prints with Woollett’s engraving of Claude Lorrain’s Enchanted Castle in Melville’s collection (CAT 128) shows that Swanevelt did, indeed, “set off” his scene “with any tranquil thing you please” (in the words of Melville’s “At the Hostelry”). Morning and Evening each feature a landscape layout with which Swanevelt had become comfortable in Italy: a path in the foreground traversed by figures beyond whom in the middle ground one sees a winding river bordered by certain picturesque objects, the wide frontal vista opening out toward a distant looming mountain glimpsed through the misty morning or fading evening light. Cut away the foreground path of Morning to reveal the fall of the stream in Evening, transform the misty morning cattle into the shaded evening horses, supplant the angular farmhouse in the morning with the round tower whose walled compound is fringed by the setting sun in the evening, and you have Swanevelt’s “serene” picturesque formula at work.   

Sir George Beaumont, the collector who owned the Swanevelt from which Woollett’s Morning was made, was a moving force in the creation of London’s National Gallery in 1824. Worried that his own collection, distinguished as it was, would not entirely hold its own against the paintings from the Angerstein collection which formed the core of the nation’s new gallery, Beaumont in 1828 withdrew several paintings from his bequest to the National Gallery, one of them being Swanevelt’s morning scene, “a downright imitation of Claude & vastly inferior” (Owen and Brown 215). I have not yet been able to trace the fate of the painting itself after Beaumont withdrew it from the National Gallery bequest.  

T. Tylston Grey, in a fine overview of Woollett’s entire career in the Art-Journal in 1881, attributes his pictorial acheivement to his technical knowledge (ability to integrate multiple methods of engraving in a single plate) combined with "a remarkable originality of style" (enriched by "a thourough understanding of chiaroscuro"). Greg declares that Wollett “attained his highest sunlight effect” in his Morning after Swanevelt.  “Far in the background of the picture the sun is rising behind some distant hills, and a wonderful soft light suffuses the whole background. The peculiar delicacy of the light at sunrise is here caught exactly, with a truth that could hardly be expected in an engraving” (301-02). Melville’s collection, in addition to several prints engraved by Woollett, included an engraving of Woollett himself (fig. 1):

Louis Fagan, in his catalogue raisonné of Woollett’s engravings, examined ten painstaking “states” by which Woollett had achieved his magical effects in Morning. The first state is simply “The Etching” of the entire plate. In the next two states the foreground and then the entire plate are “rebitten.” In the 3rd and 4th states “cross lines” strengthen “the shadows on the houses,” “cross-hatchings are added on the clouds,” and the “distant mountains” are “finished.” More work is done on the sky in the 5th, 6th, and 7th states. Further attention is then given to “the ducks in the water on the left,” “the figures walking on the road, just above the bridge,” and “the centre group and riders.” The 9th state is the first published state, “with titles, etc.” In the 10th state, the title is completed and the dedication added (no. 120, p. 56). B. T. Pouncy, who completed the plate after Woollett’s death, also engraved Melville’s copy of The Church of the Benedictine Abbey of Bec (our CAT 182). 

Melville’s copy of the Woollett / Pouncy engraving of Swanevelt’s Morning (which I first examined at the home of his great-granddaughter Priscilla Ambrose in Irving, Virginia, and was subsequently donated by her to the Berkshire Athenaeum) is in a frame that may possibly date from the period of Melville’s ownership (as is its companion Evening engraving). Unlike its Evening companion, as can be seen by their respective reproductions here, Morning has a right-angle tear running up the tree near the right border and across the upper foliage into the light, sun-streaked clouds. Of unknown origin, this rent might remind some readers of Melville's Pierre of the rent that Pierre’s doting mother made in her own painted portrait when she plunged a fork into her own “painted bosom” in a fit of maternal petulance (NN P 130-31). Conservation by the Berkshire Athenaeum had mitigated the appearance of the original rip, but it can still be seen. 

The copy of Swanevelt’s Morning in Melville’s print collection has some specific similarities with one of the first Swanevelt paintings he could have seen with his own eyes: the  Italian Landscape at the Dulwich Gallery during his visit as a young man in 1849 (see fig. 1 from our previous section). Each features a cluster of travelling figures in the foreground. Each features a solitary figure near a river in the middle ground (the fisherman on the riverbank in the painting, the man crossing the bridge in the print). Each also features the looming shape of what appears to be the same distant mountain in the background (a shape resembling that of Mount Greylock as seen from Melville’s writing desk at Arrowhead).  

All the above features in Melville’s print and the Dulwich painting take the eye from foreground to middle ground to background in the center of the image, framed by a substantial habitation on the side (the farmhouse complex at the far left of the print, the religious structure at the upper right of the painting). The pictorial formula in these two works alone comports well with the verbal formula with which Melville’s Swanevelt, “that Dutchman good,” articulates his personal vision of “the picturesque” in “At the Hostelry”: “Some scene select, set off serene / With any tranquil thing you please” (NN BBO 154).