Havemeyer's Delacroix Expulsion at Metropolitan Museum, 1890-91

Before leaving the three Rembrandt portraits that Havemeyer loaned to the Metropolitan in November 1890, let’s take a quick at the one Delacroix painting that Havemeyer had purchased along with the two Berensteyn portraits in December 1888. Havemeyer had loaned Delacroix’s Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise to the Loan exhibition in November 1890 (no. 7 in Handbook no. 6) but not to the one that followed in May 1891. After returning to the Havemeyer private collection in 1891, Delacroix’s Expulsion had remained there until 1929 when, rather than returning to the Metropolitan as part of the Havemeyer Bequest, it was auctioned in New York in 1930, eventually becoming the property of the Hamilton Bequest and the Museum of Culture and Sport in Glasgow, Scotland. The Loan exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum from November 1890 to April 1891 apparently provided the only opportunity residents of New York would ever have to see this amazing painting face-to-face (fig. 6).

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Figure 6. Eugene Delacroix. The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, oil on canvas, c. 1838-1847. Design for fresco in cupola of library of Palais Bourbon, Paris. Museum of Culture and Sport, Glasgow, Scotland. Loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, November 1890 to April 1891.

Melville had always been interested in pictorial depictions of the expulsion of Adam and Eve, the “orchard thieves” he alludes to in the opening chapter of Moby-Dick (NN 6). In the journal entry he wrote in Rome in 1857 while “recovering from the stunning effect of a first visit to the Vatican,” he recalled the depictions of “Adam & Eve” high above him in Raphael’s Loggia in spite of the “faded bloom of the paintings” (NN J 108). Later in life he would be able to revive that memory when looking at the copy he had acquired of Volpato’s engraving of Raphael’s Loggia at the Vatican (CAT 108). As we showed in Chapter 2, Volpato’s engraving is oriented in such way that you can see in ink on paper the Expulsion scene that Melville had seen in living, if faded, color when standing directly below the fresco Raphael had painted high above him three centuries earlier (CAT 108, fig. 1 and fig. 2). What a striking, informative contrast Delacroix’s large, dramatic oil painting in the Loan exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in 1890 would have provided to the Expulsion scene he had seen at the Vatican thirty-four years earlier and could recall with the aid of Volpato’s print from the 1770s.

From 1838-1847 Delacroix had executed a commission to decorate the library of the Chamber of Deputies in the former Palais Bourbon in Paris. With the help of assistants, Delacroix had painted “the entire vault of the long gallery which was to house the library,” designing an image appropriate to each section of the library holdings (fig. 7). The painting of the Expulsion scene that Havemeyer loaned to the Metropolitan Museum was a study for the fresco that was painted high above the holdings in Religion.

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Figure 7. Eugene Delacroix. Frescos on the ceiling of the Library of the Chamber of Deputies in the Palais Bourbon, Paris, 1838-1847.

Melville arrived in Paris in late November 1849, two years after Delacroix (and his assistants) had completed the frescos high above the library of the Palais Bourbon—and one year after the Revolution of 1848 had toppled the monarchy and put a new Republican government in power. Earlier in 1849, Melville had published Mardi, the allegorical novel in which he alludes to the recent political revolution in France in the guise of “the eruptions we had witnessed in Franco,” where “the kings were cast down” but the future was as yet unclear (NN M 523-27). The recent political drama may be one reason that in 1849 Melville “crossed the Seine towards the Chamber of Deputies” on the morning of his first day in Paris, returning after "seeing great numbers of troops marching all about.” Undeterred, he returned to “the Palace of the Deputies” a few days later and “sauntered in past the guards.” He “would have gained admittance to the Chamber but for the unlucky absence of my passport, which I had left to get the ‘visa’s of the Belgian & Prussian ministers” (NN J 30, 33). Another reason he was so eager to gain admittance to the Palace of The Deputies may be well have been to see the frescos by Delacroix on the ceiling of the Library.

Melville devoted most of the five days between the two attempts to enter the Palace of the Deputies to seeing artworks at the Louvre, the Luxembourg Palace, the Hotel de Cluny, the Bibliothèque National, and other galleries, palaces, and churches. The Luxembourg Palace was “only a few hundred yards from Melville’s lodging.” Like that of the Palace of The Deputies, the vault of the library of the Luxembourg Palace was decorated with frescoes that Delacroix had designed and painted in the 1840s. “The gallery in the east wing, which had once housed Rubens’s twenty-four paintings from the life of Marie de Médicis, was now devoted to the works of living French artists.” Among those, paintings by Delacroix were prominent among what Melville called this a “fine gallery of modern French school” (NN J 32, 338-39). Two Delacroix masterworks that later went to the Louvre, The Barque of Dante (1822) and Liberty Leading the People (1830), would have been on display during Melville’s 1849 visit. So he would have known enough to recognize Delacroix’s brilliant coloring and dramatic characterization if he saw the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise during its short cameo appearance in New York forty years later.