Parting Thought on van Mieris, Metzu, Netscher, and ter Borch

Naumann, in his influential essay on “Frans van Mieris’ Personal Style” from 2005, notes that “in the seventeenth century, art history was a nascent discipline, concerned more with biography and the relationships between artists than with individual analyses of works of art. To appreciate the stylistic developments of a painter’s production necessitates comparisons that are impossible without color reproductions or retrospective exhibitions in which works from different stages of an artist’s career can be seen side by side” (Buvelot 42).  

By the time Melville was collecting prints in 1870s and 1880s, art lovers did not yet have the benefit of the kind of color reproductions and retrospective exhibitions mentioned by Naumann, but much progress had been made. Free-lance critics such as Hazlitt, comprehensive publications such as The Works of Eminent Masters, monthly publications such as the Art-Journal, specialized publications such as The Wonders of Engraving, as well as the proliferation of new books being devoted to individual artists and national schools—all of these provided Melville with an impressive amount of art-historical information for appreciating the four-hundred-plus prints he was assembling at his home on East 26th Street.  

As we have already seen, Melville’s experience of the engraved prints and illustrated books in his own home would have been greatly enriched by any paintings he would have seen after the creation of the New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1871 and its move to Central Park in 1880, especially after he retired from his full-time job at the Custom House in 1885. That enrichment would have increased after the Museum doubled its size with its new addition in 1888-89, after which Melville was in still the process of revising “At the Hostelry,” the ambitious colloquy among Old Master painters that remained unpublished at his death in September 1891.