William Woollett and Samuel Smith after Herman van Swanevelt, Evening

Herman van Swanevelt (b. 1603) and Claude Lorrain (b. 1604-05) were contemporary painters, one born in central Netherlands, the other in northeastern France, each settling in Rome in the late 1620s. Each was deeply drawn to the Italian landscape, each often leaving the city to sketch similar objects and terrain in varying conditions of light, perhaps even living in the same house in 1628. Throughout the 1630s they developed what came to be known as the Italianate style in landscape painting in such similar ways that the works of one have sometimes been attributed to the other, with some attributions still in dispute. It had long been believed that Swanevelt modeled his landscapes on those of Claude, but it is now widely thought that they each developed in parallel ways and that each painter equally influenced the other (see "Herman van Swanevelt: Dulwich Picture Gallery"). 

Melville’s prints of Swanevelt’s Evening and Claude’s The Enchanted Castle (CAT 128, fig. 1 below) gave him a convenient way to compare and contrast Italianate evening scenes by each artist. William Woollett, after completing Claude’s Enchanted Castle in 1782, was working on Swanevelt’s Evening scene up until his death in 1785. Woollett in each print conveys each painter’s ability to convey the magical suspension and the softening light as evening evanesces into night. 

Melville’s copies of these evening scenes also demonstrate Woollett’s ability to replicate the way each painter deploys various figures in a landscape. At first glance Swanewelt’s Evening and Claude’s Enchanted Castle appear to feature a comparable compositional structure. Each artist deploys living figures across the foreground, with water and picturesque objects in the middle ground, before the whole vista, bathed in evening light, opens out toward mountains in the distance. But Woollett’s placement of bright light on the sitting figure in the foreground of The Enchanted Castle, echoed by the bright light behind the castle in the middle ground, heightens the unified feeling of solitary meditation that Claude had expressed in the painting itself. Woollett has deployed his light and shade very differently in his engraving of Swanevelt’s Evening, deepening the variety of modulations with which Swanevelt had deployed his light and shade to stress the multiplicity of figures engaging in a variety of actions across the undulating landscape leading back to an entrance arch and tower fringed with light. 

The skill with which Woollett’s print (completed by Samuel Smith) has preserved and even probably even heightened the play of light over multiple figures and objects across and within an undulating landscape in Swanevelt’s original painting (which I have not yet located) is indicated the precision with which the British Museum is able to specify the content if its copy of same 1787 print collected by Melville: 

Landscape: a castle with a round tower and arched entrance in front of mountains  in the middleground, on the rocky banks of a river, with two tall trees to the left, tree-covered cliff to the right, a mounted man driving four donkeys ahead of him on the far back and figures on the near bank, including three people talking to the left and two men behind them with sticks and bundles, one to right, near a small waterfall. (https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1842-0806-317) 

The miscellaneous nature of the images in Melville’s copy of Swanevelt's Evening certainly meshes with the way Swanevelt describes his own aesthetic in “At the Hostelry”: 

For me, I take to Nature’s scene 
Some scene select, set off serene 
With any tranquil thing you please— 
A crumbling tower, a shepherd piping, 
My master sure with this agrees. 

The psychological unity of the imagery in Melville's copy of Claude’s Enchanted Castle perhaps helps to explain why Melville’s Claude chooses not to agree with his friend’s assertion: “So naught he said, what’er he felt, / Yet friendly nodded to Swanevelt” (NN BBO 154). 

One wonders whether Melville, when composing or revising “At the Hostelry,” actually pulled out for comparison his copies of prints after those painters whose visions of the “picturesque” he was comparing in the poem. That he was already doing so by 1876 is strongly suggested by the passage in “The Banker” canto of Clarel imagining the “poor fellow” who “Lighted on Holbein’s Dance of Death / Sly slipped among his prints from Claude” (NN C 2.12.28-21). 

As contrasting images of morning and evening, Melville’s two engravings after Swanevelt invite comparison with two paintings by Claude that Hazlitt celebrated in a passage Melville marked in the 1845 edition of Table-Talk that Melville inherited after the sudden death of his brother Gansevoort in 1846. Melville marked with a blue crayon, in the second half of the opening essay “On the Pleasure of Painting,” the passage about the traveler who “turns aside to view a county-gentleman’s estate with eager looks, thinking it may contain some of the rich products of art. There is an air round Lord Radnor’s park, for there hang the two Claudes, the Morning and the Evening of the Roman Empire.” Those are the paintings that for Hazlitt, in the passage marked by Melville, were “stamped on his brain, and live[d] there forever, a clue to nature and a test to art” (Cowen 5:498-99). 

Hazlitt discusses those two paintings more extensively in a passage that Melville marked in the copy of Criticisms on Art that he acquired in 1870. In the essay on “Pictures at Wilton,” Hazlitt conveys the pleasure he felt when actually seeing “the two famous Claudes” owned by Lord Radnor, the Morning and Evening of the Roman Empire. Hazlitt does not consider these to be Claude’s most accomplished landscapes. But the attempt simply to describe the skill with which Claude has depicted the cattle on the Evening canvas leads Hazlitt to a generalization that inspires Melville’s first underline on this page: “so precise is the touch, so firm the pencilling, so classical the outline, that they give you the idea of sculptured cattle, biting the short green turf, and seem an enchanted herd! They appear stamped on the canvas to remain there forever, as if nothing could root them from the spot. Truth with beauty suggests the feeling of immortality” (Criticisms, p. 105; MMO 263a, 105.14-15). 

Hazlitt tries to explain the intensity of the feeling described above by confessing that he has “never felt a longing, a sickness of heart, to see a Dutch landscape twice,” in spite of the virtues of Dutch realism. “But those of Claude, after an absence of years, have the effect, and produce a kind of calenture.” Melville underlined the word calenture. He then put a check mark and drew a marginal line alongside this explanation by Hazlitt: “The reason of the difference is that, in mere literal copies from nature, where the objects are not interesting in themselves, the only attraction is to see the felicity of the execution; and, having once witnessed this, we are satisfied. But there is nothing to stir the fancy, to keep alive the yearnings of passion.” Here we see both sets of markings on page 105.

Melville’s underline of the word “calenture” in Hazlitt’s praise of Claude’s landscapes speaks to one difference between his copies of Woollett’s engravings after Swanevelt’s Evening and Claude’s Enchanted Castle. The “felicity of execution” in Swanevelt’s Evening landscape is highly proficient, but it does not produce “a longing, a sickness of heart, to see [it] twice” comparable to that of The Enchanted Castle. Swanevelt can depict (in Melville’s words) “any tranquil thing you please,” but he does “nothing” (in Hazlitt’s words) “to stir the fancy, to keep alive the yearnings of passion.” As competent as Swanevelt is in savoring and painting the Italian landscape, as often as he may have ambled through that landscape with Claude himself, this Dutchman cannot quite catch the magic of Melville’s “sweet” and “discreet” man from Lorraine (NN BB0 154).  

 
The next essay in Melville’s copy of Criticisms on Art addresses Hazlitt’s visit to the collection at Burleigh House. Hazlitt is sorry to say that “there are two Claudes at Burleigh, which certainly do not come up to the celebrity of the artist’s name.” But this only brings to mind “other works by the same hand . . . surpassing every idea the mind could form of art, except by seeing them.” And this inspired Melville to draw his own a marginal line alongside the next two sentences: “The name of Claude has alone something in it that softens and harmonizes the mind. It touches a magic chord.” Hazlitt had followed those two sentences with this rhapsodic one: “Oh! matchless scenes, oh! orient skies, bright with purple and gold; ye opening glades and distant sunny veils, glittering with fleecy flocks, pour your enchantment into my soul, let it reflect your chastened image, and forget all meaner things!” (Criticisms, pp. 122-23; MMO 263a, 122.24-26, https://melvillesmarginalia.org/Share.aspx?DocumentID=70&PageID=24534).  

In “At the Hostelry,” Melville extended his initial tribute to the “sweet” and “discreet” man from Lorraine with his own rhapsodic appreciation of Claude’s primary occupation: “To haunt the Arcadian woods in haze, / Intent shy charms to win or ensnare, / Beauty his Daphne, he the pursuer there” (NN BB0 154).