Parting Thought on Peter Paul Rubens

In the fourteen engravings relating to Rubens in Melville’s print collection, the painter's transnational panache takes on a decidedly French coloring. The Marie de Medici cycle made this Flemish artist a pictorial historian of France; first in the Luxembourg Palace, then in the Louvre, his pictorial tribute to Marie de Medici became a place of pilgrimage for French citizens and artists alike. Whatever one thinks of Marie herself, her husband, their son, or their two daughters who themselves became queens, the commission for twenty-four paintings that Rubens executed between 1622 and 1625 made her court an indelible part of the artistic history not only of France but of the world. While French-born Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin were pursuing their own pictorial devotion to the art of France by living and painting in Italy, German-born and Flemish-based Rubens was creating paintings as deeply enmeshed in the history of France as theirs were in the art of Italy. In this transnational sense, Melville's engravings after Rubens in this chapter of our catalog relate to his engravings after Claude and Poussin in the French chapter as much as they do aesthetically to those after Titian and Veronese in the Italian one.

Jacques Thuillier notes that French artists of the generation of Jacques Blanchard in the 1630s and 1640s paid relatively little attention to the paintings of Rubens, whose time had seemingly passed. Abraham Bosse did give passing attention to the engraved work of “P. Rubens in Antwerp” in his Sentimens of 1649, but was not until the age of Le Brun, after 1665, that “fame suddenly returned to Rubens in France.” For “the tapestry series The Life of a King . . . Le Brun turn[ed] back to the Life of Marie de’ Medici.” When Watteau came to Paris early in the early 1700s, he stayed in the home Claude Audran, then the curator of the Luxembourg Palace, giving the young man from Valenciennes unlimited access to Rubens’s Marie de Medici cycle that changed his art, and that of France, forever. Before long, the Marie de Medici cycle in the Luxembourg Palace had come be seen as “a veritable temple of painting”—resulting in Thuillier’s claim that Watteau and Boucher “would not be themselves without the vigorous example of Rubens which, for all its delayed action, finally became to fecundate of all French painting” (42, 50, 55, 56, 136).

That influence continued throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in spite of all the political and aesthetic changes brought by the French Revolution and its aftermath. Thuillier notes that David, “the painter of The Rape of the Sabines, still appears the direct heir of Rubens.” In 1807 Taillasson has eloquent praise for Rubens’s use of allegory in the Death of Henry painting. When Delalcroix is painting his Barque of Dante, “he returns to the Louvre to look once more at the Debarkation of Marsailles.” Looking ahead to Renoir, “no one is more like Rubens in his joyous sensuality, in his passion for feminine flesh, for hot colors, silks, flowing hair” (56, 143, 145-47). We saw in chapter 3 that the Goncourt brothers had been highly responsible for resurrecting the reputations of both Watteau and Boucher in the essay they published on “L’Art du XVIIIe siéle” in 1860. In the process of doing so they had this to say about Rubens’s influence on the French painters of that century: “All of them descend from that founding father and that bold initiator: Watteau as much as Boucher, as much as Chardin. For a hundred years it seems that the painting of France had no other cradle, no other school, no other homeland than the Galerie of the Luxembourg, the Life of Marie de Medici: the god is there” (Thuillier 150).

The general stylistic influence of Rubens upon Watteau is seen in all three engravings that Melville collected after paintings by that master, but especially in Finette and L’Île Enchantée, engraved in Paris in 1870 and 1882, respectively (CAT 159, 160). The tactile influence of Rubens on both Watteau and Boucher is most directly seen in the color and texture of Melville’s copy of Boucher’s Venus et Amours in the facsimile in the “Chalk Drawing” style that Péqnégnot published in Paris in 1867 (CAT 161). As Wintermute has demonstrated, Watteau had developed his own his own trios crayon technique by copying figures and small ensembles from the Coronation and other paintings in the Marie de Medici cycle. Young Boucher had then made more than 100 etchings after crayon drawings by Watteau (Wintermute 40, 123-26). It is no accident, then, that Melville’s copy of a facsimile drawing in “the Chalk Style” after Boucher’s Venus et amours can put one in mind of Rubens as well as Watteau—not only of the Venuses that Rubens depicted in the prints Melville acquired from the Marie de Medici cycle and The Horrors of War, but also of the “plump and peachy” Venus whose charms are extolled by Rubens in the colloquy among the Old Master painters in Melville’s “At the Hostelry” (NN BB0 159).

As Melville continued to revise “At the Hostelry” up to the time of his death in 1891, the fourteen free-standing engravings relating to Rubens in his print collection were augmented by thirteen engravings in the essay on “Sir Peter Paul Rubens” in the copy of The Works of Eminent Masters that Melville acquired in 1871. We will take a quick look at the way in which three of the engravings in the Works essay enriched his poetry and print collection.

The 1854 essay on Rubens in The Works of Eminent Masters begins with the engraving of a Rubens self-portrait that Melville may have seen when he visited Windsor Castle in 1849 (fig. 1 below). Melville owned a free-standing print of the same portrait engraved by Benoist as the frontispiece of Galerie de Rubens, dit du Luxembourg in 1809 (CAT 185). The engraving in Works reverses the orientation of both the Benoist engraving and the Rubens painting, but all three relate well to verbal portrait with which Melville introduces Rubens in “At the Hostelry”: “The Knight, Sir Peter Paul, ‘twas he / Hatted in rich felt, spick., and span, / Right comely in equipment free / With court-air of Lord Chamberlain” (NN BBO 159).

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Fig. 1. Rubens Self-Portrait introducing essay on “Sir Peter Paul Rubens” in Melville’s copy of The Works of Eminent Masters. London: Cassell, 1854. 2: 225. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

The engraving of Venus and the Loves in the Works essay (fig. 2 below) nicely augments the engravings of Venus in Melville’s free-standing print of The Horrors of War (CAT 198). This Venus comes closer to the “plump and peachy” Venus Rubens evokes in Melville’s poem. One reason for this is the way she bends her body (and her breast) to the admiring cherubs. The other is the way the shading in this engraving brings out the folds and the feel of her flesh more fully than the outline engraving in the free-standing print of The Horrors of War.

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Figure 2. Peter Paul Rubens. Venus and the Loves. In Herman Melville’s copy of The Works of Eminent Masters. London: Cassell, 1854. 2: 245. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

The engraving of Peace Concluded in the Works essay (fig. 3) added a new image from the Marie de Medici cycle to the eleven freestanding prints Melville acquired from that cycle (CAT 187-197). In the sequence of that cycle, this image follows immediately after the print Melville knew as The Reconciliation of Mary de Medicis with her son (CAT 197). Here we again see Mercury from behind, but now he is leading the Queen up the steps into a temple of security, holding the base of the caduceus of peace upright before them while she is still threatened by the muscular man, demonic fury, and stormy sky behind her. Her still perilous position has caused Mellin and Wolf to christen the painting that inspired this print The Queen opts for Security (194-204).

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Figure 3. Peter Paul Rubens. Peace Concluded. In Herman Melville’s copy of The Works of Eminent Masters. London: Cassell, 1854, 2: 232. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

In May 1891, the month in which Melville published the poems of Timoleon in a limited edition of twenty-five copies, he had one of his rare opportunities to see actual paintings attributed to Rubens since his visits to London, Paris, and Cologne in 1849 and to Florence and other Italian cities in 1857. Among the Handbooks for visitors published by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art during the five years before Melville’s death in September 1891, Rubens appears in the very last one, listing paintings on display from May to November 1891. Two paintings by Rubens are listed among “Pictures by Old Masters in the Old Eastern Gallery, Y.” One, in the North-East Stairway, is listed simply as “Peter Paul Rubens. Flemish School—Lions Chasing Deer” (no. 121). The other painting by Rubens, seen in the Old Eastern Gallery in close proximity to those by other Dutch and Flemish artists, was Portrait of the Artist’s Wife (no. 52). Neither painting is currently included among the paintings by Rubens on the Museum’s website because each was deaccessioned or reattributed decades after they went on display in May 1891. If Melville did see those two paintings in the last four months of his life, he would have had no reason to think they were not by Rubens. 

Rubens painted several portraits of his first wife, Isabella Brant, as well as of his second wife, Helena Fourment, so the title Portrait of the Artist’s Wife does not help us distinguish between or among them. The Hand-Book does indicate that this portrait had been “presented” to the Metropolitan Museum in 1880 by Frederick E. Church, the American landscape painter who was a founding trustee of the institution. Additional information in the Museum’s archive, generously provided to me by curator Alison Hokanson, indicates that full title of the painting was Portrait of His Second Wife, Helena Fourment, in a Fur Coat and that “it was at some point determined to be a copy after Rubens,” this resulting in its being “returned to the family of the donor in 1928” (email 5 June 2023). This painting was presumably a copy of the celebrated Rubens painting of Helena Fourment in a Fur Robe now at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (fig. 4).

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Figure 4. Peter Paul Rubens. Helena Fourment in a Fur Robe, oil on canvas, 1636-38. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Beyond the listing in the May 1891 Hand-Book, the archives at the Museum do not document a painting by Rubens that could be associated with the Lions Chasing Deer that was on display at that time. Alison Hokanson, however, did find a record for “a painting with the same title, Lions Chasing Deer, by Frans Snyders,” which had entered the Museum collection in 1871. Frans Synders (1579-1657) was a Flemish colleague of Rubens who often collaborated with him in animal and hunting scenes. Between 1636 and 1638, Synders assisted Rubens in executing a large commission for a hunting pavilion in Madrid; he eventually produced more that fifty hunting paintings and animal designs after paintings by Rubens. Synders’s painting entitled Two Young lions chasing a roe (fig. 5), now in Munich, probably gives a good approximation of the content and style of the Lions Chasing Deer that was displayed, as a painting by Rubens, in 1891 but deaccessioned, as a painting by Snyders, when auctioned at the American Art Association in 1929.

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Figure 5. Frans Snyders. Two young lions chasing a roe, oil on canvas, 1620-25. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

If Melville did see the two paintings attributed to Rubens in the exhibition that opened at the Metropolitan Museum in May 1891, he would also have seen paintings by other Flemish and Dutch artists whose work was represented in his own print collection. These included David Teniers the Younger, Jan Both, Nicholas Berghem, Adrian Van Ostade, Gaspar Netscher, Jan Wouverman, and Meindert Hobbema, (nos. 7 and 57, 8, 32, 40, 41, 47 and 67, 7, 81; see our CAT 201, 212, 213-14, 203, 208, 202, 220-21, and 218). In the Loan Collection that opened in the adjacent part of the Old Eastern Gallery (X), Melville would have seen six additional paintings by two Dutch artists whose prints he collected, five by Rembrandt and one by Albert Cuyp, all on loan from Mr. H. O. Havermeyer (nos. 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, and 12; see our CAT  199-200 and 215-16). In addition to Rubens himself, Teniers and Rembrandt were present in Melville’s unfinished manuscript of “At the Hostelry,” as were Jan Steen, Anton Van Dyck, and Franz Hals among the Dutch and Flemish painters in the Old Eastern Gallery (nos. 12 and 66, 45, 51). 

The introduction to the Hand-Book for visitors to the Museum from May to November 1891 offers some insight into how the paintings of Rubens and other Dutch and Flemish painters were then regarded. The “greatest period” in the history of art occurred in Italy “at the opening of the 16th century,” but “its examples are costly, and in this country almost unknown.” In the 17th century, the “Flemish and Dutch Provinces produced (outside of Spain) the most successful painters of the age—Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt and a large number of scarcely less distinguished names.” The 17th century Dutch and Flemish schools have produced “the largest number of pictures by old masters owned by the Museum” and these include “a certain number of superior pictures and many fair specimens.” Although “the great 16th century Italian Art is undoubtedly superior to the 17th century Northern” in “meaning and form” and “generally in color,” the great attraction of “the Dutch and Flemish schools, for moderns,” is the “realism of their subjects” and the modernity of their “landscape art.” One measure of Rubens’s high standing in New York in 1891 is in the phrase putting “Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt” at the head of Flemish and Dutch painting (4-5).