Dutch Figure Painting at the Metropolitan Museum, in Melville's Home, and in "At the Hostelry"
In this section we have seen paintings by van Mieris, Metzu, and Netscher that the Metropolitan Museum was collecting and displaying during the years in which Melville was collecting prints after those same artists. From November 1890 through September 1891, while Melville was still revising “At the Hostelry,” he would have had easy access to Dutch and Flemish Old Master paintings in three of the Museum’s galleries (Fig. 1). In spite of the newly acquired 19th century French paintings that had recently been installed in the New Western galleries, the “larger number of pictures owned by the museum” were still from “the 17th century Dutch and Flemish Schools” (Handbook No. 6 for Old Eastern Galleries Y and X, May to November 1891, pp. 4-5).
Figure 1. Gallery Layout, Second Floor, Metropolitan Museum of Art, General Guide to Exhibition 1888-89.
During the last year of Melville’s life, the Old Eastern Gallery Y was displaying eleven paintings by seven Dutch and Flemish Old Masters who appear in Melville’s “At the Hostelry.” At the same time, the Old Eastern Gallery X was displaying seven paintings by two additional Dutch and Flemish Old Masters who appear in “At the Hostelry.” And the New Eastern Gallery O was displaying by 16 paintings by seven additional Dutch and Flemish figure painters who appear in Melville’s poem. Those 34 paintings included multiple canvases by Rembrandt, Rubens, Hals, Steen, Teniers, ter Borch, and Netscher (see Handbooks Nos. 6 and 10 for May to November 1891).
At his home on East 26th Street, Melville had 21 prints after three Dutch and Flemish painters on display at the Metropolitan Museum who were also featured in “At the Hostelry” (3 after Rembrandt, 16 after Rubens, 2 after Teniers). He also had prints after nine Dutch and Flemish painters on display at the Metropolitan Museum who were not featured in “At the Hostelry” (van Ostade, Metzu, Netscher, Both, Berghem, Cuyp, Hobbema, Wouverman, and Ruisdael). His print collection also included four prints after two of the Dutch painters in “At the Holstelry” whose paintings were not currently on display in the Museum (Swanevelt and van de Velde the younger), plus two prints after one Dutch artist not in “At the Hostelry” whose paintings were currently absent from the above-mentioned galleries (van Mieris).
Two of the Dutch and Flemish painters most prominent in Melville’s “At the Hostelry” were not represented in Melville’s print collection or on the walls of the Metropolitan (Brauwer and Dou). But Melville did have substantial, well-illustrated essays on the life and art of each in the copy of The Works of Eminent Masters that he acquired in 1871. As we have seen, this ambitious publication (two volumes in one) also contained comparable essays on Rembrandt, Rubens, Teniers, ter Borch, van Ostade, van Mieris, Metsu, and Steen. That publication also included substantial essays on other Dutch and Flemish artists in Melville’s print collection still to be covered in this chapter (Van de Velde, Lariesse, Swanevelt, Both, Berchem, Cuyp, Potter, Wouverman, Ruysdael, van Everdingen, and vander Heyden).
The sophistication Melville showed in the number and range of Dutch and Flemish artists whose prints he collected and whose conversations he invented in “At the Hostelry” was enriched by many of the books in his library beyond The Works of Eminent Masters. These included his copies of Monkhouse’s Rembrandt, Gower’s The Figure Painters of Holland, Cundall’s The Landscape and Pastoral Painters of Holland, Hazlitt’s Criticisms of Art, and Duplessis’s The Wonders of Engraving. The essays in Works and books by Monkhouse, Gower, Cundall, and Hazlitt all contained excellent lists and appendices of the English and European museums containing specific works by each artist under discussion. These would have been very helpful to Melville in connecting the prints he had acquired after Dutch and Flemish artists, enriched by paintings by those artists he had seen at the Metropolitan Museum, to paintings he had seen by those same artists when visiting the galleries of London and the Continent in 1849 and again in 1857.
When revising “At the Hostelry” in the late 1880s and early 1890s, Melville’s memory of paintings he had seen decades earlier in England and on the Continent would also have been enriched by the journal entries he had habitually written after each overseas gallery visit. The journal of his 1849 voyage to London and the Continent was preserved, edited, and published by his granddaughter Eleanor Melville Metcalf in 1950. In 1989 the journal of that voyage was combined with Melville’s 1856-57 journal of his voyage to the Near East and the galleries of Europe in the Northwestern Newberry edition of the Journals edited by Howard C. Horsford. Horsford’s very well illustrated “Editorial Appendix” to that edition (pp. 163-609) is extremely attentive to the painterly and art-historical elements of those travels.
Among the “unlike things that meet and mate” in the poem “At the Hostelry” Melville was still revising at the time of his death were the engraved reproductions of the impressive array of Old Master paintings in the prints he collected in his own home on East 26th Street; the expanding collection of authentic paintings by many of those same Old Masters at the Metropolitan Museum uptown in Central Park; the sophisticated and quite specialized array of illustrated books and essays about many of those same artists in his own library; the memory of the extraordinary array of paintings by those same artists he had seen, and recorded in his journals, in England on the Continent in 1849 and 1857; and the memory, the eye, the mind, and the vision to “fuse” yet once more, “with Jacob’s mystic heart, / To wrestle with the angel—Art” (NN PP 280).
Dutch Figure Painting at the Metropolitan Museum, in Melville's Home, and in "At the Hostelry"