Melville’s Taferelen Cutouts

We could have cataloged Melville’s 25 prints cut from the Dutch Taferelen with the other Dutch prints in this chapter, but we cataloged them in Chapter 1 because of their exclusively biblical subjects. These prints, too, would have had a certain personal and familial resonance for Melville. The Taferelen der voornaamste geschiedenissen van het Oude en Nieuwe Testament, published in the Hague in 1728, was a 3-volume, richly illustrated, Dutch-language, Biblical commentary on Scenes from the Principal Histories of the Old and New Testaments that had been “drawn by the renowned artists Hoet, Houbraken, and Picart, and engraved in copper by the best masters (fig. 1).

Figure 1. Title page of Taferelen der voornaamste geschiedenissen van het Oude en Nieuwe Testament. The Hague: Pieter de Hondt, 1728.

We don’t know if, when, or where Melville might have encountered that hefty 3-volume Dutch-language compendium of Biblical Taferelen published in the Hague in 1728, but as a child in New York City and a teenager in Albany he would certainly have had easy access to Het Nieuwe Testament, his mother’s copy of a two-volume, Dutch-language edition of the New Testament published in Amsterdam in 1715 (Sealts no. 63). We do not know whether Melville himself or someone else (a friend, a relative, a print dealer?) had carefully cut the twenty five, two-inch-square, block-letter images out of the huge folio pages of the 3-volume Tafeleren. We do know they were cut from the original pages of the 3-volume edition published in the Hague in 1728 because the fragmentary Dutch text on the back of each of Melville’s cutout images corresponds exactly to the Dutch text that had been printed in the same position on the back (verso) of the same page of the 1728 edition (2:157). Figures 2 and 3 below show us the front (recto) and back (verso) of Melville’s cutout from the Taferelen we have cataloged as CAT 43.

Figures 2 and 3. Front (recto) and back (verso) of one of Melville’s cut-out images from the Pieter de Hondt edition of the Dutch Taferelen published in The Hague in Amsterdam in 1728.

Unlike most of Melville’s cutouts from the Taferelen, this image with the capital letter D contains no chapter or verse, so without access to the original publication it would be difficult to relate its cosmic image to any specific biblical source. As published in the Taferelen, this cosmic D introduces the section in which the sun stands still in Joshua 10:12-13. This is confirmed when one sees the Dutch word “stilstaan” on the back (verso) of Melville's cutout image (figure 3).

One of the sentences that Melville marked in his copy of Hazlitt’s Criticisms on Art declared that “There are only three pleasures in life pure and lasting, and all are derived from inanimate objects—books, pictures, and the face of nature” (Criticisms, p. 41: MMO 263a, https://melvillesmarginalia.org/Share.aspx?DocumentID=70&PageID=24451). Hazlitt’s three pleasures (books, pictures, and the face of nature) are as visible in this little cut-out from the Dutch Taferelen as they are in the much larger prints from the much larger paintings in our chapter on Flemish and Dutch Old Masters. Each of Melville’s twenty-five cut-outs from the 1728 Tafeleren is cataloged, displayed, and interpreted in the section of Chapter 1 beginning with this Introduction: https://melvillesprintcollection.org/exhibits/show/ch1/taferelen-intro.