J. B. Racine after Jan Both. Vüe des Environs de Naples.

As Melville would have known from The Works of Eminent Masters, Jan Both (c. 1610-1652) worked closely with both Claude Lorrain and Herman van Swanevelt during his residency in Rome between 1638 and 1641. After returning home to Holland, he became a major influence on  Berchem, Cuyp, and other Dutch landscape painters (see fig. 1). Melville’s copy of Works introduces its extensive treatment of the life and art of “Both of Italy” by suggesting that “between the rural style of Ruysdael and the historic conception of Poussin and of Claude there was a style to be created, and John Both filled the gap” (I: 374). He did so by bringing golden light to the Italian landscapes of his Dutch predecessors and by adding elements of Dutch realism to the idealized landscape subjects of Claude and Swanevelt.   

Georges Duplessis, in Melville’s copy of The Wonders of Engraving, admires Both as both a painter and engraver. He does find it “strange” that this Dutch native “learnt to understand Italian art through the works of the well-known French artist Claude Gellée.” He sees the influence of Claude as especially strong in Both’s paintings, whereas in his etchings he "addressed himself more to nature.” Duplessis contrasts the “beauty” and “truth” of Both’s artistry with that of Swanevelt, who is “cold and monotonous” by comparison (104-5). The essay in Works mentions seven different French engravers, beginning with Daudet, who made engravings after Both, but does not mention Racine (I: 378). 

Both’s best-known Italian subjects are wooded landscapes, often featuring a rocky prominence, a winding stream, and overhanging trees framing the action of the figures moving through it. The subject of Melville’s print instead provides an up-close view of an urban wall in the environs of Naples near a windmill you might expect in Holland over the calm expanse of a body of water with three small boats near the shore wall. The home with the smoking chimney is similar in architectural style to the one in Swanevelt’s Morning (CAT 214), but its pictorial effect is entirely different. Both’s house and windmill are rooted on a particular shore, not floating in the middle distance, an effect that is perhaps exaggerated by Racine’s overly conspicuous engraving style, whose heavy cross-hatchings and thick reflections of shapes in the water deface whatever atmospheric harmony may have been in Both’s original image.   

Racine’s Vüe des Environs de Naples is a large folio engraving (11 3/8 x 14 ½ in). Jean-Baptist Racine was involved in many of the most ambitious multi-volume engraving projects in France in the second half of the eighteenth century, including Cassas’s Voyage en Syrie et en Palestine and the Galerie du Palais royale (represented in Melville’s collection by CAT 17, 18, and 110). Le Blanc and Nagler both list Racine’s Vüe des Environs de Naples after Both; Nagler draws attention to the windmill on the town wall (vol. 10, pp. 184-85). Both’s windmill, town wall, and boats along the shore all seem to be conscious variations on the Vue des Flandre engraved after a painting by Van Goyen for Le Musée Français in 1807. Portalis-Beraldi records Racine’s having helped to engrave the Voyage á Naples et dans les Deux-Siciles, published by the Abbé de Saint-Non (3:371), perhaps helping to inspire the subject of this engraving after Both.  

The essay on Jan Both in Works emphasizes his gifts as a collaborator—with his brother Andrew when they were in Italy together; with Claude, Swanevelt, and the Poussins in Italy; and with Berchem, Wouvermans, and others back in Holland. The essay describes how Andrew died tragically in a canal in Venice (where the author surmises the two brothers had gone to study “the masculine landscapes of Titian”), summarizes Houbraken’s famous account of the friendly competition that the mayor of Dordrecht staged between Berchem and Both (whose Italianate landscapes were each so matchless he awarded the prize to both), and praised a conscientiousness in Both that spared him the censure of Gerard de Lairesse (who accused some Dutch painters of depicting “the leaf of an elm on a willow, an ash or an oak”) (I: 374-78).  

The most extensive sections of the Works essay address Both’s achievements as a landscape painter in relation to his contemporaries both in Italy and in Holland. Its thoughtful  accounts of his subjects, his style, and his techniques is illustrated by engravings of two of his most representative Italianate landscapes, An Italian View at Sunset and The Woman Mounted on a Mule (I: 321, 317). The latter image (fig. 2), closely related to Both’s etching of this scene (c. 1650), places “Both of Italy” perfectly between Swanevelt’s Morning and Cuyp’s Landscape, with Ruins of an old tower in Melville’s collection (our CAT 214 and 219). 

The position of the woman on the mule in the engraving after Both is quite similar to that of the woman on the camel in Melville's print after Bartlett’s Bethlehem (CAT 20). This engraving after Both illustrates many of the virtues of this painter as celebrated in the Works essay: the rich diagonal structure of his Italianate landscapes, the massing of the landscape into spatially distinct formations rather than a uniform expanse; the depiction of trees as individual objects rather than idealized filler; the presence of just enough water, and reedy growth, to provide a foreground. This image also illustrates the essay’s characterization of Both as a “theatrical Claude Lorraine.” His landscapes typically “represent a mountainous country, great accidents of land, convulsed nature, a winding rocky path carried away by rains or cut in the rock. Along this road . . . we notice travelers, peasants, and mules.” In contrast to those Italianate painters who must fill their landscapes with “gods and goddesses of more than doubtful morality” or with historical or mythological scenes, “with Both, nature is everything; but it is a wild and savage nature, so picturesque, and at the same time so real, that it seems to awaken in our bosoms the wish to wander through such scenes, and to gaze upon such trees, mountains, and hills” (I: 374-75). 

The position of the woman on the mule in the etching by Both reproduced in Works (fig. 2 above) is also quite similar to Both’s Landscape with a Peasant Woman that Melville could have seen during his visit to the Louve in Paris in 1849 (painted between 1645 and 1650). Both seems to have painted several variations on this subject. In one of these, his 1847 Scene of the Roman Compagna now in Indianapolis, the position of the woman, the features of the landscape, and the perspective from which we see them are all closer to the etching by Both reproduced in Works (see fig. 3). This luminous painting in oil on canvas, no less than the original etching from which the engraving in Works was made, embodies Both’s ability “to awaken in our bosoms the wish to wander through such scenes, and to gaze upon such trees, mountains and hills." Here is that sweet spot between Italianate luminosity and Dutch realism that Both and Berchem were each trying to achieve. 

Both's reputation, like that of Swanevelt's, began to decline sharply toward the end of the nineteenth century. The serious attention his work received in Strechow’s 1966 book on Dutch Landscape Painting in the Seventeenth Century initiated a revival of interest. By the time Ludovica Trezanni wrote her entry for the Grove Dictionary a half-century later, much more was known about Jan Both’s independence from his brother Andries (whose rustic scenes are now known to have been influenced more by Adriaen Brouwer) and about the stylistic independence of his paintings for the Buen Retiro Palace in Madrid from those by Claude and Swanevelt. “Like Claude and Swanevelt, Both arranged his landscapes along diagonal lines in order to achieve a greater feeling of depth,” but his paintings “stand out from [theirs] by virtue of their greater attention to naturalistic details, which in Claude’s paintings are depicted in a more abstract and idealized way” (485-86).