Cousen after Berchem. Crossing the Ford

Both of Melville’s engravings after Berchem show women on the margin of a stream with rocks and trees towering high above them. Whereas Jeavons’ Landscape with Figures depicts an ensemble effort of five working women in the company of one standing man and sundry recumbent livestock, Cousen’s Crossing the Ford dramatically places a moving woman and a stationary bull at the center of the composition, the bright white light flashing off the figures of each securing their primacy amongst the subordinate figures that fill the space. Even more than the companion engraving by Jeavons, this steel engraving by Cousen highlights to the highest degree those qualities of for which Berchem’s Italianate landscapes were valued: the absolute clarity and precision of the living figures in the context of their immediate surroundings against the warm glow of the light on the slopes of the distant mountains, slopes softened by the same sun that sharpens the shapes of the wading woman and the attentive steer in the foreground. 

When this engraving was published in London’s Art-Journal in 1858, the accompanying text provided considerable information about Berchem. One story suggested that his last name Berchem, which means “hide him” in the Dutch language, derives from an episode in which Van Goyen used that phrase in an attempt to hide young Nicolaes from “his father, who wished to chastize him for some juvenile delinquency.” The Art-Journal also presented the familiar story about the mayor of Dordrecht who staged a lucrative competition between Both and Berchem to which each artist responded so beautifully that he awarded the highest prize to each. This article indicated that Crossing the Ford, painted on copper, was one of eight Berchem paintings in the collection at Buckingham Palace (see fig. 1). Even though this painting in small in size (13 ½ x 16 inches), it is “a beautiful example of this artist, true to nature, and, simple as the composition of it is, of much elegance” (336).  

Christopher White, looking closely at the female figure in 1982, gave this painting a more distinctive and informative name: A Shepherdess Carrying a Kid across a Ford. White dates the painting to 1658 and provides the obligatory close description of a Dutch Italianate landscape painting: “In the foreground, a shepherdess, accompanied by a goat and a dog, carries a kid across a stream; to the right, a bull and a cow, and to the left, a donkey. Beyond, a hilly road beside rocks, at the top of which is a man on horseback. A mountainous landscape in the distance.” In addition to calling attention to the kid the shepherdess is carrying, White notes that the painting had been “engraved by J. Cousen in . . . without the rider on the hillock.” He explains that “a rider on the hillock in the foreground” had been “painted out” at some point before John Smith’s description of the painting in 1834 (the painting had been acquired by King George IV in 1814). The missing rider had been “restored in 1971,” so he was once again at the top of the hillock in White’s comprehensive account of The Dutch Paintings in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen in 1982 (White, no. 17, pl. 16, pp. 20-21). 

The 1853 copy of The Works of Eminent Masters that Melville acquired in 1871 listed Crossing the Ford as one of six Berchem paintings in the collection of the Queen at Buckingham Palace. Like the 1858 engraving by Cousens that Melville acquired, its description of the painting included everything but the rider on the hillock: “a very mountainous landscape, a shepherdess, accompanied by a goat and a dog, walks through a piece of water, in which two cows are standing.” This writer, like many, singles out this painting for special attention: “A picture of striking effects: more true to nature than usual, and great elegance of execution.” The same paragraph also included this short description of the Landscape with Figures that Melville acquired in the engraving by Jeavons (CAT 217): “A hilly landscape, enlivened in the foreground by animals and figures; three women with rushes, and two cows particularly attract attention" (Works, 132-33).  

Wolfgang Stechow’s commentary on Berchem in 1966 helped to establish, more than was clear in Melville’s day, that Jan Both was the greatest influence on the Italianate landscapes of the 1650s in which Berchem created his own rich “combinations of Campagna and Dutch motifs” (155-56). But Berchem did not limit himself to the Italianate landscapes for which he is best known today. In the 1660s he also painted “imaginary Mediterranean harbor scenes.” One of these, The Ancient Harbour of Genoa, was reproduced in Melville’s copy of Works (fig. 2).

The above image would have been a welcome supplement to other images of Ancient Italy or Greece in Melville’s illustrated books and print collection (such as Turner’s The School of Homer or Staccoli’s Achille in Sciro). In Melville’s travels, this image would have been a fine reminder of the three-day visit he made Genoa in April 1857. After savoring the paintings in this city’s palaces and galleries, he devoted a day and a half to exploring the city’s environs, climbing up to the forts and ramparts at the top of the mountain overlooking the city before returning to the shoreline at sea level and the ascending, the next day, step by step, three hundred feet to the top of the famous lighthouse whose upper terrace offered a “superb” panoramic view: “Sea coast to south. Promontory. All Genoa & her forts before you” (NN J 123-24; see figure 5 and figure 6 CAT 110). 

In the 1670s and 1680s Berchem turned his attention to historical landscapes and allegorical subjects. Paintings such as Allegory of Sacred and Profane Love brought him ever closer to the evolving subjects and styles of Gerard de Lairesse and Willem van Mieris. D. J. Schoep compared the “coloring and the treatment of the nude form” in late works by Berchem with that in Lairesse’s chastely sensuous Venus Presenting Arms to Aeneas of 1668 (our CAT 213, fig. 2; Schoep, Gods, 241). For Ann Harris, those same late developments in Berchem’s style “anticipated the “18th-century Rococo mode of Boucher (who owned his paintings), Fragonard, and Watteau.” Those same elements, however, helped to provoke the striking aversion that the English landscape painter John Constable had taken to the works of both Berchem and Both by the time he was preparing a lecture in 1836. A few days before delivering the lecture, Constable confided to a friend that he “hopes to murder Both and Berghem on Thursday next at a quarter to four o’clock” so as to eliminate their pernicious influence on English painters (59).