Flemish and Dutch Masters

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) epitomized the transnational artist. Born in Westphalia in modern-day Germany, he is generally classified as a Flemish artist although he could as easily be called French, Italian, Spanish, German, English, or Dutch given the range of his residence and the influence of his painting. That range and influence was in politics as well as painting, as he was a diplomatic representative to or from all of the above nations during his years of artistic fame. Unlike Claude Lorrain or Nicolas Poussin, French artists who lived primarily in Italy, Rubens was an artist of the world who was as much at home anywhere as his art has been since he painted it. As he famously wrote before a visit to Paris in 1625, “I regard the whole world as my community, and I believe that I should be very welcome everywhere” (White 188). Watteau, the one Flemish artist cataloged in our French chapter, was transnational in a more narrowly geographical sense, having been born in Valenciennes, the town that had moved back and forth between French and Flemish control during the years before his birth in the late seventeenth century.

The Dutch masters who make up the bulk of this chapter include some who are also called Flemish according to where and when they worked. Flemish and Dutch were fluid and flexible terms during the seventeenth century—a century in which the Dutch were controlled by the Spanish and warred with the English while also having border wars with Germany to the east and Flanders and France to the south and east while being artistically influenced by Italy far to the south, either by actual travel or stylistic influence. Melville’s prints after Flemish and Dutch masters, unlike those of Italian and French artists and subjects, are confined primarily to the seventeenth century during what is still known as the Golden Age. Within this relatively small duration of Flemish and Dutch art, his interests and acquisitions were again impressively broad, in both figurative and landscape painting. This is seen in his book collection as well as his art collection; his library included individual volumes on Rembrandt, on The Figure Painters of Holland, and on The Landscape and Pastoral Painters of Holland in addition to impressive coverage of Dutch and Flemish art in books by Hazlitt and Duplessis as well as in compilations such as The Works of the Eminent Masters. 

Herman Melville had a strong personal connection to Dutch culture through his mother Maria Gansevoort and her Dutch ancestors in Albany, New York. Harmen Harmense van Gansevoort had migrated to Albany from The Netherlands in the 1650s. As a ten-year-old in 1830 Herman Melville moved to Albany with his parents and siblings after his merchant father Allan Melvill went backrupt in New York City. After his the death of his father in 1832, Herman spent his teenage years in Albany and its environs before sailing for the South Seas from New Bedford in 1841. His only visit to the Dutch nation from which his Albany ancestors had emigrated was on the way back home from Italy in April 1857. After sailing down the Rhine, he stopped in Amsterdam, and then Rotterdam, visiting their museums and galleries before sailing to England on his way back home to Pittsfield, Massachusetts.  

After Melville moved his family to New York City in 1863, the Dutch cultural influence was as strong in his life as a print collector as it had been during his teenage years as a Gansevoort descendent in Albany. We have already seen that influence in his acquisition of twenty-five engravings cut from the pages of a famous Dutch-language Biblical commentary published in the Netherlands in 1728: Taferelen der voornaamste geschiedenissen van het Oude en Nieuwe Testament (CAT 24-48).