Sands after Rubens. Henry 4th contemplating the portrait of M. de Medicis

First, the contemplation of a portrait has already become a key element in the plot and the psychology of each work.  Second, we are already seeing the degree to which each major action—or inaction—in each work is being explicitly shaped by the weight of a past that has been destined, imagined, or both. Third, the first four “books” of Melville’s sixth novel have already made Pierre not only the most psychological but the most pictorial of Melville’s early works. Already the reader has seen the extended contrast between the “chair-portrait” of Pierre's father as a “brisk, unentangled young bachelor” that Pierre keeps in a closet and the more formal portrait of that same father as a “middle-aged married man” that Pierre’s mother conspicuously displays in the “great drawing room,” each of these tactile portraits playing off against the imagined “shrine” that Pierre’s psyche has shaped into the “perfect marble form of his departed father” (NN P 68-73).  

Other conspicuous pictorial elements in the early chapters include Lucy’s “easel for crayon-sketching,” the “blue portfolio” that Pierre retrieves from her bedroom, and the evening Pierre imagines in which he and Lucy will “look over” a “book of Flemish prints” before turning to “Flaxman’s Homer—clear-cut outlines, yet full of unadorned barbaric nobleness.” Next would be “Flaxman’s Dante,” but Pierre is fearful of “the lines of misery” he imagines in “Francesca’s mournful face,” so he decides, “No! I will not open Flaxman’s Dante!” (39-42). A more idiosyncratic example of Melville’s pictorialism early in the novel comes in Book 3 (“Presentiments and Verification”), where the portentous letter Pierre receives from Isabel has been “stained . . . here and there, with spots of tears, which chemically acted upon by the ink, assumed a strange and reddish hue—as if blood and not tears had dropped upon the sheet” (64-65). (For Melville’s own prints after Flaxman’s Aeschylus and Flaxman’s Dante, see CAT 2-5 and CAT 80-102; many of his Flemish prints are the ones after Rubens, CAT 187-198.) 

Pierre is not only the most overtly pictorial of Melville’s novels; it is also the most francophilic. Pierre is itself conspicuously French as an American name; it derives from the Latin Petrus, which more often becomes Peter in English. The “chair-portrait” of Pierre’s father, painted before Pierre was born, captured a period in the young future father’s life when he was lavishing attention on a young emigrant girl from France in a way that eventually seems, to Pierre’s fervid imagination, to corroborate the claim from Isabel, the mysterious letter writer herself newly arrived from France, that Pierre is her brother by the same father. This sketchy, but highly suggestive strand of the novel resonates strongly with the degree who which Melville’s own future father Allan, when about the age of Pierre’s father in the chair-portrait, had immersed himself in the social and pictorial culture of France during his residence in Paris in 1801-02, a familial immersion most conspicuously represented by Françoise Lamé-Fleury Melvill, the Parisian wife that Allan’s older brother Thomas (Herman’s uncle Thomas) brought to America when he returned from Paris. (For young Allan Melvill’s immersion in the pictorial culture of France that radiated from the celebrated salon of Mme. Recamier, see our Parting Thought on David, Regnault, Taillasson, and Peyron and MBB 3.5. 

As evidence that Melville was thinking of his own Francophile father Allan when writing about Pierre’s own Francophile father in Pierre, consider this description of the “chair-portrait” in “Reminiscence,” book 4: 

An impromptu portrait of a fine-looking, gay-hearted, youthful gentleman. He is lightly, and, as it were, airily but grazingly seated in, or rather flittingly tenanting an old-fashioned chair of Malacca. One arm confining his hat and cane is loungingly thrown over the back of the chair, while the fingers of the other hand play with his gold watch-seal and key. The free-templed head is sideways turned, with a particularly bright, and care-free morning expression. He seems just dropped in for a visit upon some familiar acquaintance. Altogether, the painting is exceeding clever and cheerful; with a fine, off-handed expression about it. (72)

Compare that description with this 1810 portrait of Herman’s actual father, Allan Melvill, by John Rubens Smith, son of John Raphael Smith, that was preserved by Herman and other direct descendants of the family until it was given to New York’s Metropolitan Museum in 1946 (figure 2).