Jeavons after Berchem. Landscape with Figures

Nicolaes Berchem (also spelled Berghem) was born in Harlem in 1620, where he lived until the mid-1650s, when he began to spend considerable time in Amsterdam, where he settled around 1670. Although three different trips to Italy have been proposed for the Italianate landscape style he began to master in the 1650s, no such trip has actually been documented. Like Jan Both, Berchem created Dutch paintings of Italian subjects bathed in golden light that were extremely popular with his Dutch contemporaries and with English and French collectors and engravers for at least two hundred years after they were painted. Berchem was “one of the most talented, versatile, and well-paid artists of his time,” creating “more than 300 drawings and around 50 etchings” in addition to more than 800 paintings. Beyond his own original creations, Berchem “painted the staffage in works of such artists as Jacob van Ruisdael, Meindert Hobbema, and Aelbert van Everdingen” (Kilian 757). A substantial essay on Both in Melville’s copy of The Works of Eminent Masters (fig. 1) declared that “if the word picturesque had not previously existed, it would have had been necessary to have invented it to characterize the genius of Berghem” (130). 

Melville’s two engravings after Berchem are a lovely pair. Each reproduces a painting in the Royal Collection at Buckingham Palace. Each was engraved by an English engraver who specialized in the work of J. M. W. Turner and other British landscape painters. T. Jeavons, before engraving this Italianate river scene by Berchem, had engraved a number of British and French river scenes after Turner. J. Cousen, who engraved Melville’s companion Italianate river scene after Berchem, reproduced a stunning variety of seascapes, riverscapes, and landscapes after Turner, several of which are in Melville’s collection (to be cataloged in our chapter 7). Whereas most of the landscapes and riverscapes Jeavons and Cousen reproduced after Turner were of particular locales specified in their titles, those after Berchem depict imaginary landscapes whose generic titles (such as, in this case, Landscape with Figures) belie the precision with which the figures and the landscape are rendered. 

The precision and exactitude of Berchem’s treatment was important to the English audience for which Jeavons engraved Landscape with Figures, as seen by the accompanying text in The Royal Gallery of Pictures in 1840: “A rocky bank on a fine broad stream. In the foreground, a horse, cows, sheep, and a goat; a milk-maid with a pail on her head, and three women gathering rushes; and under the rock, a man and woman binding rushes.” The importance this painting’s Italianate coloring was seen in the next sentence: “A warm evening light is spread over the picture, which is finished with the greatest care” (19). The painting had been acquired by King George IV by 1806; its generic title had become more precise by the time Christopher White cataloged it as part of the Royal Collection in 1982: Landscape with Women Gathering Reeds and a Milkmaid (his cat. no. 18). The precision of the figures in the landscape is much clearer in the steel engraving by Cousen than in the oil painting by Berchem, whose Italianate coloring softens the figures in a golden glow (fig. 2). 

The copy of Works Melville acquired in 1871 provided a handy reminder of paintings by Berchem in galleries he had visited as a young man in London in 1849. Its essay on Berchem mentions one painting at Hampton Court and another at Windsor Castle before discussing five separate Berchems at the Dulwich Gallery (2: 132). One of those five, A Farrier Shoeing an Ass, had inspired one of Hazlitt’s delicious critiques in Melville’s 1843 copy of Criticisms on Art. Hazlitt had been impressed with the “truth of character and delicate finishing” in that particular painting, “but the fault of all Berghem’s pictures is that he continues to finish after he has done looking at nature, and his last touches are different from hers. Hence comes that resemblance to tea-board painting, which even his best works are chargeable with” (29-30).  

Georges Duplessis, in the copy of The Wonders of Engraving that Melville acquired in 1871, celebrated Berchem’s precision in both painting and printmaking. His “much-sought-for paintings and engravings are equally delicate, clear, and refined. His compositions—in which the animals are better than the figures—are set in landscapes designed with great care. He delighted in foliage; his delicate needle has thrown the light on the right places, the shadows are never confused, the air circulates freely, giving life to all it touches” (101-02). Such qualities are clearly expressed in the two engravings Melville acquired after paintings by Berchem we are cataloging here. They are also evident in this engraving of Berchem’s Conversation on a Journey reproduced in Works: 

The above engraving of Berchem's Conversation on a Journey in Melville's copy of Works exemplifies the "pictorial fusion of mind and vision" that enriched Melville's later life as he increasingly savored the only three pleasures that Hazlitt found "pure and lasting: books, pictures, and the face of nature."