P. Devel. La Maison de Ville de Tervere

Melville’s print of the famous Town Hall of Veere (La Maison de Ville de Tervere) was published in Brussels in 1711 in the third edition of Les Délices des Pais-Bas, a publication inspired in part by the peace between France and the United Provinces that was signed in 1697. The text, written primarily by J. B. Christyn, documents the history and celebrates the “delights” of the individual provinces and leading cities of the newly united “Netherlands.” The successive editions published by F. Foppens in Brussels were richly illustrated with engravings of historical buildings and other curiosities. Pieter Devel was a Brussels engraver whose illustrations in the third edition in 1711 are considered to be his masterpiece (fig. 1). Devel’s engraving of the Town Hall of Veere appeared in volume 3, in which it was bound as a fold-out—as you can see by the creases in Melville’s copy (above). The tower of this Town Hall is visible directly behind the great church in The South-West Approach to the Town of Veere with the Groote Kerk that Jan van der Heyden painted in 1665-66 (our CAT 226, fig. 2). 

Veere was a port city on the island of Walcheren in Zeeland, the maritime province in southwest Holland nearest to England. Veere had flourished in the 15th and 16th centuries as “a port of entrance of raw wool from Scotland.” Its town hall was built in 1474 by the Van Borselen family, who “had exclusive rights to the Scottish wool trade.” Its exterior was “decorated” with “seven statues” of the van Borselens themselves, easily visible in Melville’s print (Wallace 1993, p. 33). Prosperous trade between Scotland and Zeeland expanded into military collaboration against Spanish occupation of the Netherlands during the reign of Queen Elizabeth in the late sixteenth century. Francis Vere of Scotland (1560/61- 1609) was a military leader of the resistance to the Spanish from the time he joined the Royal Army in 1585 through his retirement 1604. As major-general of English and Scottish troops during the Ten Years War from 1588 to 1598, he won one dramatic victory after another in the Low Countries by which he cemented English-Dutch alliance and was elevated to general. As general of the allied forces, he led decisive victories over the Spanish at Nieuwpoort and Ostend before his retirement (Markham, 38-45, 265-85, 345-46). 

As with most of Melville’s prints, we don’t exactly how, where, or why he acquired his copy of La Maison de Ville de Tervere by Pieter Devel that appeared in volume 3 of the 1711 edition of Les Délices des Pais-Bas. We can see that the fold-out illustration from the original volume has been flattened out and matted for display, and that the annotations on the matt (“4.151” and a variation on the word “Tervere”) appear to be in Melville’s hand. In its detailed depiction of the edifice of an ambitious architectural subject, this print has impressive counterparts in each of the previous chapters of this website (and especially in the British chapters to come). In acquiring this etching of the façade of a Dutch public building built in 1474, published in Brussels in 1711, Melville was showing the same antiquarian eye that had enabled him to see the “streets of Amsterdam like long lines of old fashioned frontispieces in old folios & old quartos” during his one full day in Amsterdam in 1857 (NN J 127).  

On a more personal level, Melville’s engraving of the Town Hall of Veere would have been another manifestation of the Dutch culture from which the first of his Gansevoort ancestors emigrated to Albany in the late 1650s. Given the close mercantile and military bonds between the Scottish and the Dutch that enabled the creation and preservation of Veere’s Town Hall, perhaps this print would also have symbolized for Melville a bond between the Dutch ancestry of his Albany mother Maria Gansevoort and the Scottish ancestry of his Boston father Allan Melvill. And perhaps there was even a subliminal connection between Veere, the Dutch town whose town hall was depicted in Melville’s print collection; Francis Vere, the Scottish commander who had helped to free Veere and its surrounding provinces from Spanish occupation; and Captain Edward Fairfax Vere, the “Starry Vere” who successfully commanded English warships against those of Napoleon but was  unable to save young Billy Budd from England’s Articles of War in the novella Melville left unpublished at his death (NN BB 16-17, 55-57). 

Veere at the beginning of World War II was a seaplane base for the Royal Netherlands Navy until the base was evacuated after being bombed by German war planes in May 1940. German troops successfully invaded the island a few days later. Veere and the rest of the island remained under German control until November 1944, when they were liberated “by the Scottish troops of the British 52nd (Lowland) Infantry Division during Operation Infatuate, the Allied assault on Walcheren.” Veere was one of the few towns on the island to be virtually undamaged in the fighting” (“NLO6--Operation Infatuate”). That is one reason its Town Hall, built in 1474, still stands today, though its van Borselen founders no longer stand on their perches on the façade (fig. 2).  

The town of Vere ceased to be a seaport in 1961, when the creation of a massive dam blocked its access to the North Sea. The former Veere Inlet from the sea became Lake Veere (Veerse Meer), one of the largest lakes in the Netherlands. Once an international trading center of 150,00 to 200,000 residents in the 16th century, Veere in the 21st century has fewer than 2,000 permanent residents. It has, however, successfully reinvented itself as a popular tourist center for yachting enthusiasts and aquatic sports (Fodor’s Holland 1988, 221-22). On the map below, the name Zeeland is printed on the island of Walcheren; the small town of Veere is on the shore of Lake Veere. Above the word Zeeland on the map is Rotterdam, the Dutch city from which Melville sailed to London after his short visit to the Netherlands in 1857. Antwerp and Ghent are below Zeeland across the border in Belgium (fig. 3). 

I am grateful to L. Zylbergeld and Arlette Smolar-Maynard of the City Museums of Brussels and to Fred Musto of Yale University for helping me identify the source of Melville’s print of La Maison de Ville de Tervere.