Parting Thought on Van de Velde and Lairesse

Willem van de Velde the Younger lived in London from 1672 until his death in 1707, but he remained engaged in depicting Dutch naval history while also pioneering the British tradition of marine painting as represented by prints from Melville’s collection to be displayed and documented in our Chapters 6 and 7.

Gerard de Lairesse lived in Amsterdam from 1665 until his death in 1711, but his pictorial imagination had migrated to ancient Greece and Rome at the same time as he was bringing French classicism into the world of Dutch realism within which he had come of age. His relation to Frans van Mieris and his son Willem epitomized that duality.

Melville was ahead of the Metropolitan Museum in acquiring artworks by these two artists. By the time of his death in 1891, he had acquired engravings after the two seascapes by Velde and the one mythological painting after Lairesse we have seen from his print collection. The Metropolitan Museum by 1891 had been collecting artworks for twenty years, specializing in paintings by Dutch and Flemish artists, without having acquired or exhibited a single painting by either artist.

The first painting by van de Velde the Younger to enter the Metropolitan collection was Entrance to a Dutch Port, donated by William K. Vanderbilt in 1920. This oil painting on canvas combines the close observation of shipping young van de Velde had absorbed from his father with the tonal sophistication he had imbibed from Simon de Vlieger (fig. 1).

CAT 213 after fig 1 van de velde the younger Entrance to a Dutch port NYMet 1920.jpg

Figure 1. Willem van de Velde the Younger. Entrance to a Dutch Port, oil on canvas, c. 1665. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of William K. Vanderbilt in 1920.

Painted at the time of the Second Anglo-Dutch naval war in the mid-1660s, the virtuoso variety of vessels depicted “range from small cargo and fishing boats to a state barge and East Indiamen destined for long voyages of trade and imperialism. Two humble figures wade ashore, connecting the maritime panorama to the beholder’s space on solid ground” (“William van de Velde II, Entrance to a Dutch Port”).

The first painting by Gerard de Lairesse to enter the Metropolitan collection was Apollo and Aurora, donated by a family in New Jersey in 1943. This extraordinary example of virtuoso brushwork in service of a mythological imagination was one of Lairesse’s first ambitious depictions of an idealized classical antiquity.

CAT 213 after fig 2 Lairesse Apollo and Aurora New York Met 1943.jpg

Figure 2. Gerard de Lairesse, Apollo and Aurora, oil on canvas, 1671. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Donated by Mr. and Mrs. Manuel E. Rionda, 1943.

This classicizing allegorical painting of “the sun god consorting with the goddess of the dawn” also had domestic decorative function in Amsterdam in 1671, bringing “a popular subject in French and Italian painting at the time” into the display space “over the mantle of a grand Amsterdam home” (“Gerard de Lairesse, “Apollo and Aurora”).

In 1919, a year before the Metropolitan Museum acquired its first seascape by van de Velde, Eleanor Melville Metcalf inherited the bread box containing the manuscripts of Billy Budd, Sailor, “At the Hostelry,” and other works her grandfather Herman had left uncompleted at his death. In August of that year she loaned the bread box to Raymond Weaver, a professor at Columbia University, whose publication of Billy Budd in 1924 was a major step in launching the posthumous revival of Melville’s literary reputation (NN BBO 298-99).

By 1937, six years before the Metropolitan Museum acquired its first allegorical painting by Lairesse, Eleanor Metcalf donated all the surviving manuscripts from the bread box to the Houghton Library at Harvard in response to “the ever-growing interest in Herman Melville,” making possible the first “genetic” edition of Billy Budd in 1962 and the first fully transcribed edition of “At the Hostelry” in 2017 (NN BBO 302).

Reputation in literature, as in painting, continues to ebb and flow.