Parting Thought on Melville's Copy of Cundall's Book on Cuyp, Ruisdael, Hobbema, and Potter

Since Melville’s copy of Frank Cundall’s The Landscape and Pastoral Painters of Holland was published sometime in 1891, the year of Melville’s death on September 28, we do not how much time he would have had to read or assimilate it. But the very act of acquiring this book shows his active interest in learning more about the lives and careers of Aelbert Cuyp, Jacob Ruisdael, Meindert Hobbema, and Paul Potter, four Dutch artists whose landscape and pastoral paintings were represented in Melville’s print collection. Newly published information about each of these artists could also have enriched Melville’s expansive treatment of more than a dozen Dutch Old Master painters in “At the Hostelry,” the ambitious poem about the pictorial picturesque he was still actively revising at the time of his death. Perhaps if this book had been published earlier, or if Melville had lived longer, one or more of Cundall’s painters might have found a place in his poem.

As we have seen in this section of our site, Melville already had substantial information on the lives and careers of Cuyp, Ruisdael, and Potter in the essays devoted to each of these painters in the two-volume edition of The Works of Eminent Masters, published in 1854, that he acquired in 1871 (Sealts no. 169). Cundall in his chapters on each of those artists in 1891 not only updated information from English language sources; he also drew heavily upon new, independent research by Dutch, French, and German sources from the mid-1850s through the late 1880s that provided entirely new information, interpretations, and illustrations for each of the four artists. Along with the Contents of the Volume and its List of Illustrations, Cundall provided a Bibliography of publications he had consulted by European scholars that were new to Art History and to the English-speaking world (fig. 1 a + b).

Figure 1 a + b. Cundall’s Bibliography of European scholars who had published studies of Ruisdael, Hobbema, Cuijp, and Potter between the mid-1850s and the late 1880s in Melville’s copy of The Landscape and Pastoral Painters of Holland (New York: Scribner and Welford, 1891). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

The illustrations in Cundall’s 1891 book also provided Melville with a wide range of works by each of the four artists he had not previously seen. The essays on Cuyp, Ruisdael, and Potter in Works had been illustrated by a good selection of line engravings after the paintings, but Cundall reproduced a wider variety of works by each of those artists with a wider variety of techniques. Cundall reproduced five paintings by Cuyp, but also three drawings and one etching. He reproduced four paintings by Ruisdael but also one drawing and one etching. And he reproduced three paintings by Potter but also two etchings (see fig, 2 a + b). Cundall in his Preface described the various reproductive techniques used to produce the images in his book: “All the full-page illustrations are direct reproductions of the paintings, and the various etchings and original drawings have been copied in facsimile. The smaller sketches, made from paintings for this work, are given in order to indicate the composition of the various pictures” (vi). Each of Cundall’s four reproductions from Hobbema were from paintings, but all of these would have been relatively new for Melville, since Hobbema had not himself been represented by an essay in Works.

Figure 2 a + b. List of Illustrations of works by Ruisdael, Hobbema, Cuyp, and Potter in Melville’s copy of Cundall’s The Landscape and Pastoral Painters of Holland, 1891. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Cundall’s book was also handy in other ways. His 28-page “List of the Principal Works of Ruisdael, Hobbema, Cuyp, and Potter” documented the location of works by these four painters in an exceptionally detailed way. This sequential list would have shown Melville which galleries in which cities in which countries owned which paintings by any of the four artists. It also would have helped to remind Melville which paintings by which artists he would have seen during his visits to England and the Continent in 1849 and to the Continent and England in 1857. The entry on Ruisdael alone documents 249 paintings in 94 collections in 50 cities, towns, or estates in twelve nations or nation states (Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain and Ireland, Holland, Italy, Russia and Sweden). A good example of the detail and expanse of this documentation is seen in this two-spread from the 4-page section listing 80 paintings by Ruisdael in Great Britain and Ireland (fig. 3 a + b). In addition providing the title, location, and subject of each painting, Cundall often lists previous owners, important exhibitions, notable commentary, engraved reproductions, and even the form in which Ruisdael signed, inscribed, or initialed that particular work (pp. 150-51).

Figure 3 a + b. Two pages from the list of paintings by Ruisdael in Great Britain and Ireland in Melville’s copy of Cundall’s The Landscape and Pastoral Painters of Holland.

Melville’s acquisition of the 1891 edition of Cundall’s The Landscape and Pastoral Painters of Holland would also have enriched the value of the 1871 edition of Duplessis’s The Wonders of Engraving that he had acquired in 1875. Because Cundall was one of the first English-language writers to pay close attention the etchings by Ruisdael, Potter, and Cuyp, drawing specifically on the editions of etchings by Ruisdael and Potter that Duplessis had published in French in the 1870s, the expertise Duplessis had brought the etchings of these artists, and to the entire history of engraving in Western Europe, was a unique resource. As seen in figure 4 a + b below, Duplessis structured The Wonders of Engraving chronologically by national school, with successive chapters devoted to the evolution of engraving in Italy, Spain, the Low Countries, Germany, England, and France.

Figure 4 a + b. Contents in Melville’s copy of George Duplessis, The Wonders of Engraving . . . Illustrated with Ten Reproductions in Autotype; and 34 Wood Engravings, by P. Sellier (London: Low and Marston, 1871), acquired in 1875 (Sealts no. 195).

The forty-two reproductions with which Duplessis illustrated this history included engravings by 5 of the Dutch and Flemish artists Melville had collected (Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, Ruisdael, and Potter) and four of the French artists that Melville collected (Claude Lorrain, Watteau, Bosse, and Audran after Nicholas Poussin). But maybe the most important part of The Wonders of Engraving for Melville would have been the last chapter on various processes of engraving.

Nearly all of the engraving techniques discussed in Duplessis's chapter on "Processes" were represented in Melville's print collection--and most of those were also alluded to in his writings. The new emphasis on etchings by Ruisdael, Potter, and Cuyp in Cundall’s new book would have added to what Melville had already learned from Duplessis about the processes that had produced the wood engravings, copper plate engravings, line engravings, etchings, mezzotints, aquatints, chalk engravings, and color engravings within his own collection of more than four hundred prints.