Parting Thought on Neyts and Devel
These two prints by Gillis Neyts and Pieter Devel reflect the diversity and range of Melville’s collection of Flemish and Dutch prints. Each artist created an original image to be printed from his own engraved plate, whereas most of the other prints in this chapter were created by engravers from various nations and eras who translated paintings by Flemish and Dutch artists into ink on paper. These two original engravings by Flemish artists bookend the 13 engravings after Peter Paul Rubens that begin this chapter, with other Flemish artists (van Dyck, Teniers, van Tilborgh) scattered among all the Dutch artists in between.
The subjects of these two etchings, a landscape without human figures and a town hall without human figures, contrast with the pervasive bustle and action of human figures throughout this chapter. A striking variety of human figures populate the religious, historical, and mythological subjects of Rubens, Rembrandt, and Lairesse; the indoor and outdoor genre scenes of Teniers, van Tilborch, van Ostade, van Mieris, Metsu, and Netscher; the Italianate landscape scenes of Swanevelt, Both, and Berchem; the Dutch landscape scenes of Cuyp, Ruisdael, and Hobbema; and the outdoor action scenes of van de Velde, Potter, Wouvermans, van der Heyden, and van Everdingen.
The seemingly random times and places at which the Neyts’s Landscape with the Tree near the Bank of a River and Devel’s La Maison de Ville de Tervere were published—one in London a century and a half after the etching was made in Antwerp, the other in Brussels more than two centuries after the Town Hall was built in Veere—symbolize the irregular rhythm of creation and reproduction throughout this chapter.
The Golden Age of Dutch and Flemish painting in the 17th century coincided with religious, civic, economic, nationalistic, and military warfare that continually shifted geographical boundaries and political alliances at the same that artistic creation, inspiration, and dissemination were bringing hearts and minds from disparate, fractured, and warring societies closer than ever together.
The above contrapuntal rhythm that runs through the Dutch and Flemish prints in this chapter also animates the colloquy among Dutch, Flemish, Italian, and French Old Master painters in “At the Hostelry,” the ambitious poem about painters that Melville the print collector was still revising at the time of his death in 1891. The same poet who had been seeking out the “intersympathy of creeds” among the three Abrahamic religions in Clarel in 1876 (NN C 1.5.207) was now seeking out the aesthetic commonalities among European Old Master painters for whom, in the words of the Dutch painter and tavern owner Jan Steen, “All’s picturesque beneath the sun” (NN BBO 162).