Parting Thought on Flemish and Dutch Old Masters

In addition to the 44 Flemish and Dutch prints catalogued in this chapter, Melville collected 25 biblical prints from the Dutch Taferelen that was published in 1728 (CAT 24-48). These 69 prints are as comprehensive in subject matter and as diverse in printing technique as are the 50 prints in chapter 2 (Ancient Rome to Modern Italy) or the 63 prints in chapter 3 (Three Centuries of French Painting). The Italian, French, and Dutch components of Melville’s print collection all include engravings after an impressive array of major paintings by major painters; a consistent mix of religious, mythological, landscape, genre, and literary subjects; a variety of printing techniques ranging from copper engraving, steel engraving, and etching to lithograph, mezzotint, and aquatint; and fluid relationships within Melville’s life as a novelist, poet, traveler, gallery-goer, book collector, and family man. Each of these commonalities within Melville’s life as a print collector, of course, finds contrasting expression within in each national component. 

As a traveler and gallery-goer, Melville spent much less time in the Netherlands and its galleries (two galleries in three days in 1857) than in France or Italy. But he had been introduced to unforgettable Dutch and Flemish Old Master paintings as a young man in London, Paris, and Cologne in 1849 and as a more seasoned gallery-goer in Amsterdam and Rotterdam in 1857. Beginning in 1872, as he was building his print collection at his home on East 26th Street in New York City, he had potential access to the Flemish and Dutch paintings which dominated the collection of the embryonic Metropolitan Museum as it moved uptown into its current Central Park location in 1880. Although the numerous Dutch and Flemish paintings in the Museum’s inaugural exhibition in 1872 were quite mediocre by European standards, by the time Melville had retired from the Custom House at the end of 1885 and the Central Park building had doubled its space in 1888, the New York’s Metropolitan Museum was beginning to acquire, borrow, and exhibit Dutch and Flemish Old Master paintings that could rival many of those that Melville had seen in London, Paris, and Cologne in 1849 and in Amsterdam and Rotterdam in 1857. 

Throughout the 1870s and into the late 1880s, when Melville was building his print collection, Dutch and Flemish paintings were far more numerous at the Metropolitan Museum than were those from France or Italy. Dutch and Flemish artists were very well represented in Melville’s library in both volumes of The Works of Eminent Masters; in his books devoted to Rembrandt, The Figure Painters of Holland, and The Pastoral and Landscape Painters of Holland; and in William Hazlitt’s dazzling commentary on Dutch and Flemish artists in Melville’s copies of Table Talk, Sketches of the Picture Galleries of England, Criticisms on Art, and Painting and the Fine Arts (Sealts 266a, 263a, 263). In “At the Hostelry,” the poetic colloquy among Old Master Painters Melville left uncompleted at his death, the Dutch, Flemish, and Italian painters greatly outnumber the French, Spanish, and Germany. The two most striking personalities among Melville’s Old Masters are Rubens (Flemish) and Veronese (Italian), whereas the two who most effectively energize the conversation are Brouwer (Flemish) and Steen (Dutch), Steen being the tavern owner who declares that “All’s picturesque beneath the sun” (NN BBO 162). 

Perhaps the strongest resonance for Melville of the 44 Dutch and Flemish prints here in Chapter 4 is that most of them reproduce paintings created in the Netherlands between 1630 and 1660. Each of those prints therefore conveys something about the landscape, inhabitants, architecture, and mores of the Dutch culture that Melville’s direct ancestor Harmen Harmense Gansevoort brought with him when he sailed from Amsterdam to the New World in the late 1650s, landing in New Amsterdam at the mouth of the Hudson River and then settling upriver near at the future site of Albany, where Herman Melville’s mother Maria Gansevoort was born in 1791.