Parting Thought on Teniers, van Tilborgh, and van Ostade

The editors of the London Art-Journal drew heavily on the art criticism William Hazlitt to introduce a feature essay on “Adrian van Ostade” in its November 1851 issue. After opening with Hazlitt’s declaration that “High art does not consist in high or epic subjects, but in the manner of treating those subjects,” they returned to Hazlitt to support their own declaration that “Excellence is not a comparative term, it has a substantive meaning, to whatever applied, and can no more be withheld from the pictures of Teniers, Ostade, and others of their class, than from those of Raffaelle, Correggio, and Guido” (273, 275). These arguments in support of the Dutch and Flemish artists who had “originated the domestic and genre styles of painting” closely resemble those that Melville was making for whaling as a literary subject, and whalers as human subjects, in Moby-Dick (see, for example, “The Advocate” and the “Knights and Squires” chapters). Moby-Dick was published in London as The Whale in October 1851, a few weeks before the essay on van Ostade appeared in the Art-Journal. Forty years later, Melville would be making his own argument for the domestic and genre styles in pajnting in Jan Steen’s declaration in “At the Hostelry” that “All’s picturesque beneath the sun” (NN BBO 162). 

Melville’s prints after Teniers, van Tilborgh, and van Ostade—a rustic dance, a tavern scene, and an artist in his studio—represent the genre style in Dutch and Flemish figure painting about as well as any three prints could do (CAT 202, 203, and 204). Van Tilborgh and van Ostade were both strongly influenced by Teniers, to the degree that their works sometimes look interchangeable. Wheelock attributes the Self-Portrait in the Studio now at the National Gallery in Washington to van Tilborgh the Younger (CAT 203, fig. 2) even though it had previously been attributed to Adriaen van Ostade. In making that argument, Wheelock also notes the painting’s affinity to a Self-Portrait by David Teniers the Younger in his studio (253-55). One passage that Melville heavily marked in his copy of The Works of Eminent Masters contrasts the “rustic fetȇ” of the peasants at the “alehouse of Teniers” (as seen in Melville’s engraving of Le Ballet Rustique Flamand, CAT 202) with the “peaceful smoking houses” of van Ostade (as seen on page 217 of Works and in our CAT 204, fig. 12). The peaceful spirit of van Ostade’s smoking house in Melville’s copy of Works is also seen in the card-playing scene in Melville’s copy of van Tilborgh’s L'Après-Dinée Flamande (CAT 202). Van Ostade shared those qualities that Wheelock most valued in Tilborgh’s paintings:  the portrayal of “humble individuals, whom he neither idealized nor caricatured, his primary interest being to record their basic humanity” (255).