Parting Thought on Melville the  Print Collector and Cesnola the Museum Director.

During the years in which Cesnola was filling the young museum in Central Park with Ancient Mediterranean, European Old Master, and Contemporary French art, Herman Melville was filling his  home on East 26th Street with prints depicting that same range of subjects and artists. The footnote about the “swordless charge” in Melville’s poem “The Scout toward Aldie” shows that Melville knew about Colonel Cesnola’s famous 1863 exploit by the time he published Battle-Pieces in 1866 (NN PP pp. 143,179, n 5). From the time he and Cesnola each returned to New York from Virginia in 1864, their parallel lives diverged and converged in a variety of ways of considerable interest to Melville’s evolving career as a full-time Custom House inspector who became an increasingly accomplished poet and print collector. 

I have yet to find specific evidence about whether, where, or when Melville and Cesnola may have actually met in person, but the likelihood is very high given their mutual interest in military history (especially in “The Battle of Aldie”), in collecting works of art (especially by European Old Masters), and in certain members of Melville’s own family (especially Herman’s brother Allan and Allan’s widow Jane). Here I will very briefly sketch out those strong areas of mutual interest.   

Given that “The Scout toward Aldie,” with a footnote about Cesnola’s “swordless charge” in the 1863 battle, was the longest poem in Melville's Battle-Pieces, it is likely that each would have been interested meeting in the other after each had returned to New York from the battle-fields of Virginia. The painting of Cesnola below (fig. 2) is from 1865, the year he was appointed U. S. Consul to Cyprus.

Since Herman’s brother Allan had accompanied Herman on their visit to the contested land in northern Virginia, Allan himself would certainly have been interested in meeting Cesnola too. The photo of Allan Melville below, like the painting of Colonel Cesnola above, was taken in 1865, a year after Herman and Allen had returned from the Army camp in Virginia (fig. 3). 

That Allan Melville and Luigi Cesnola did meet each other is indicated by the fact that each was a member of New York’s exclusive Century Club by the time Allan died in 1872. Allan would have been keenly aware of Colonel Cesnola’s military exploits, and subsequent imprisonment, at the Battle of Aldie in 1863. By 1872, Allan, who was a Wall Street lawyer,  might have also known something about the thousands of ancient Cypriot artworks Cesnola had excavated while serving as Consul to Cyprus and was in the process of trying to sell to New York’s newly chartered Metropolitan Museum after failing to sell them to the Hermitage in Russia and the Louvre in France ("The Cesnola Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art").

While Allan Melville would have known Luigi Cesnola as the military hero of the Battle of Aldie, his widow Jane Melville (fig. 4) would have known him primarily as the director of the  Metropolitan Museum of Art. In letter she addressed to “General di Cesnola” in August 1884, she thanked him for having been "kind enough to mention my late husband in friendly terms; yes he was a member of the Century Club when he died.” After assuring Cesnola that her late husband’s memory is still “honored by those who knew him,” she asked Cesnola when he will “come for the oil painting which I ask the Museum to accept.” Director Cesnola did accept the painting. In December she wrote him to express her gratitude for having been made “a Fellow for Life of the Metropolitan Museum of Art” (Melville, Jane).  

The painting Jane Melville donated to the Metropolitan Museum in 1884, then known as The Philosophers, was later identified as a double portrait of the Greek philosophers Heraclitus and Democritus painted in the 1640s by Jacob Jordeans, the Flemish colleague of Peter Paul Rubens (fig. 5). 

Herman Melville, who had nine engraved portraits of Greek authors and philosophers in his print collection (CAT nos. 6-14), would have been very interested in this depiction of Heraclitus and Democritus. He would have seen this work long before Jane donated it to the Museum in 1884, since he and Elizabeth had become very well acquainted with Jane Melville ever since she married Herman’s brother Allan in April 1860. In 1863, Allan sold to Herman the house at 104 East 26th Street in which he and Jane had been living. Allan and Jane moved further uptown and Herman and Elizabeth lived on 26th Street for the rest of Herman’s life, Allan and Jane having acquired their Arrowhead home in Pittsfield as part of the purchase price. Herman and Elizabeth remained in close contact with Allan and Jane until Allan’s death in 1872, and they continued to see Jane until her death in 1890. She had apparently owned the painting of The Philosophers for at least twenty years when she donated it to the Museum in 1884, so she may have acquired it about the time Allan sold their house 26th Street house to Herman in 1863. (For more detail about Jane Melville’s ownership of The Philosophers and her donation of the painting to the Metropolitan Museum, see our introduction to “Rembrandt and Other Figure Painters” 

If Herman Melville had not met Colonel Cesnola as the hero of the Battle of Aldie between the publication of his poem “The Battle of Aldie” in 1866 and the death of his brother Allan in 1872, he is likely to have met “General di Cesnola” as the Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with whom Allan’s widow arranged the donation of the painting Heraclitus and Democritus in 1884 that made her a ”Fellow for Life.” The painting was exhibited with other Flemish and Dutch Old Masters as a donation from Jane L. Melville long after Herman’s death in 1891, but it was deaccessioned in 1980 after being attributed to a follower of Jacob Jordeans. Jane Melville was not alone in addressing Director Cesnola as “General di Cesnola” in 1886. That was the name by which he had widely become known even though the actual promotion to general had not been convincingly documented (fig. 6).

Although Herman Melville was likely to have had some familial contact with Colonel Cesnola through his brother Allan or with Director Cesnola through Allan’s widow Jane, his most interesting affinity with Cesnola would have been as a collector and student of Ancient, Old Master, and Contemporary French art. Melville was able to devote much more time to collecting prints and exploring visual art after he officially retired from his uptown post for the Custom House on 79th Street on New Year’s Day 1886 (fig. 7). Melville’s last six years as a print collector coincided with some of Cesnola’s greatest achievements as a museum director. In addition to doubling the space of the Museum by adding its new building in 1888-89, Cesnola greatly enhanced the quality of his holdings by acquiring the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe collection of Contemporary French paintings in 1887 and the Henry G. Marquand donation of European Old Masters in 1889. These two conspicuous large donations brought many smaller donations of priceless paintings as well as significant loan exhibitions, including the twelve Old Master paintings, five or which were original Rembrandts, that  H. O. Havemeyer loaned from November 1890 through November 1891 in hope that the Museum would acquire them (see our Parting Thought on “Havemeyer’s Rembrandt Portraits at the Metropolitan Museum, 1890-1891” at https://melvillesprintcollection.org/exhibits/show/ch4/ptrembrandt/ptrembrandt2). 

The print collection that Melville was expanding at his home on East 26th Street during the last six years of his life had many strong affinities with the collection of paintings that Cesnola was actively expanding at the Metropolitan Museum in these same years.

Many of the Dutch and Flemish Old Masters whose paintings Cesnola was exhibiting and acquiring after 1886 (including Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Lairesse, Swanevelt, Teniers, van Ostade, van Mieris, Metsu, Netscher, Both, Berchem, Cuyp, Ruisdael, Hobbema, Wouvermans and van Everdingen) were represented in Melville’s print collection.  

As we saw in Chapter 3, the print Melville acquired after Ernest Meissonier’s small 1859 cabinet painting Lecture chez Diderot was followed by Cesnola’s 1887 acquisition of Meissonier’s 1875 masterpiece 1807, Friedland, a glorious painting 4 feet high and 8 feet wide showing Napoleon and his troops in East Prussia at the peak of his power in 1807 (fig. 8). This was then the most expensive contemporary painting ever to have been sold in France, and Melville had considerable commentary about it in his copy John Mollett’s book on Meissonier published in New York by Scribner and Welford in 1882 (53-55). 

An even stronger affinity between Melville and Cesnola as collectors involved the print Melville acquired of Edouard Manet’s 1862 etching after his own 1861 painting Boy with a Sword. As we see below, Melville wrote the word “Manet” on his copy of the print (fig. 9).

In 1889, Cesnola acquired Manet’s original painting of Boy with a Sword for the Metropolitan Museum, where one can imagine Melville would have gone to see it (figure 10). 

After its acquisition in 1889, Manet’s Boy with a Sword was exhibited in the Museum’s Old Western Galleries along with Meissonier’s Friedland, Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair, and Manet’s Young Girl with a Parrot (Hand-Book No. 1, nos. 23, 71, 78, and 124). 

Melville the print collector and Cesnola the museum director also shared a keen interest in Ancient Mediterranean culture and sculpture. The General Guide for the inaugural exhibition of the expanded Metropolitan Museum in 1888-89 devoted one map and six printed pages to a detailed summary of the ancient sculpture and other antiquities that filled the entire space of the expanded first floor. The most valuable treasures on this floor were “nearly all from the Cesnola Cyprus Collection” that the future director had begun selling to the founders of the museum at the time of its inaugural exhibition in 1872. Today the museum considers the Amathus sarcophagus (fig. 11) to be “arguably the single most important object in the Cesnola Collection.” Made of limestone and weighing 2705 pounds, “it is unique among ancient Cypriote sculptures its monumentality and in the preservation of its polychrony." Equally impressive is the degree to which its iconography “documents the thorough integration of Greek, Cypriot, and Oriental features in works of high quality at the middle fifth century B. C” (“Limestone sarcophagus”).