Havemeyer's Rembrandt Portraits at Metropolitan Museum, 1890-91
In 1886, Herman Melville, newly retired from the New York Custom House, had more time to devote to his print collection and to his walks around the city. In that same year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue created a Department of Painting whose responsibility was “to administer not just the paintings but also all the prints and drawings that came to the museum” (Quodbach, p. 10). One result of this was a series of handbooks for visitors which documented the successive exhibitions at the Museum between 1886 and Melville’s death in September 1891. In our Parting Thought on Meissonier, Manet, Toulmouche, & Leroux in Chapter 3, we looked at some of the French paintings, especially those by artists Melville collected, that were exhibited during those years. Here we will do the same for Dutch paintings, especially those by Rembrandt.
Dutch paintings were strongly represented in the original purchase of 174 paintings that established the Museum in 1871. But their quality was admittedly not high by European standards. Probably “the first authentic Rembrandt to come to the United States” was the Portrait of a Man that Henry G. Marquand purchased from an English aristocrat in 1883 and donated to the Museum in 1890 (fig. 2). In 1889, when Marquand became the second President of the Museum, one of his primary goals had been to increase the quality of the collection. One way he did that was to donate to the museum what “may have been the first work by Johannes Vermeer” to enter the United States, Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (Quodbach, pp. 8-11).
Figure 2. Rembrandt, Portrait of a Man, oil on canvas, 1655-60. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Donated by Henry G. Marquand in 1890.
In the 1880s, while Henry Marquand was building a substantial collection of Old Master paintings that he donated to the Museum at the end of the decade, Henry O. and Louisine Havemeyer were beginning to assemble the extraordinary body of Old Master and Impressionist paintings which their bequest was to bring to the Metropolitan Museum in 1929. Louisine had developed a deep friendship with Mary Cassatt in France and was entranced by paintings of the French Impressionists. Henry was primarily interested in acquiring paintings by the Old Masters—and Rembrandt in particular. In December 1888 he “bought his first two Rembrandts, the so-called Van Beresteyn portraits of 1632,” paying “a hefty $60,000 for the pair, his most expensive purchase to date.” In March 1889, “he truly made his mark as a collector of old masters, when he acquired Rembrandt’s exquisite Herman Doomer of 1640.” The $80,000 he paid for this “exceptionally well-preserved Rembrandt . . . may have been the highest price paid for any Dutch picture in the nineteenth century.” In that year Havemeyer began to create the “Rembrandt Room” within his home at 1 East Sixty-Sixth Street in New York City to accommodate the growing number of Rembrandts that were eventually donated to the Metropolitan Museum in the Havemeyer Bequest of 1929 (Quodbach, p. 14).
The private collecting activity of H. O. Havemeyer on East Sixty-Sixth Street would have had little potential connection with Herman Melville and the low-budget print collection he had been building forty blocks downtown on East Twenty-Sixth Street were it not for two exhibitions of Loan Collections that were held in the Old Eastern Gallery of the Metropolitan Museum from November 1890 to November 1891. The first Loan exhibition, from November 1890 to April 1891, included the three Rembrandt acquisitions that had immediately made H. O. Havemeyer a conspicuous collector of Old Master paintings: the two Van Beresteyn portraits and the portrait of Herman Doomer, then known as Rembrandt’s Gilder. These were three of fourteen paintings Havemeyer loaned from his collection: paintings by Franz Hals, Albert Cuyp, Alexander Decamps, Eugene Delacroix, and Camille Corot were among the others. Those fourteen paintings from Havemeyer were the first to be listed in the Hand-Book documenting the 70 paintings in the November exhibition (fig. 3). The Loan exhibition in the same gallery from May to November 1891 featured five Rembrandts, Havemeyer having added the Portrait of an Old Woman and Portrait of a Man: The Treasurer to the previous three.
Figure 3. First page of list of Paintings in Loan Collection, Old Eastern Gallery, X, November 1890 to April 1891, Hand-Book No. 6 (Metropolitan Museum of Art), p. 15. Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
As a collector of prints after Rembrandt and owner of Mollett’s 1882 book documenting the painter’s life and career, Herman Melville would have been eager to see the three Rembrandts that Havemeyer loaned to the exhibition in November 1890, followed by two more in May 1891. His interest in seeing one of them, the one known as Rembrandt’s Gilder, would have begun in 1885, his last year as inspector in the New York Custom House. On February 19 of that year, the New York Times announced that “Rembrandt’s ‘Gilder’ is here.” The painting had been purchased in Paris, not by “one of the recognized millionaires of New York,” but by “plain William Schaus, the picture dealer.” Widely considered one of Rembrandt’s most splendid portraits, its value was rumored to be as high as $100,000, causing the Times imagine “a great flurry at the Custom House on the arrival of an invoice bearing an entry of an unprecedented sum against a single picture!” The mere arrival of this painting was a blessing for the city given its reputed superiority to “the two or three pictures” by Rembrandt already on this side of the Atlantic. As a portrait, it is “simple, utterly straightforward, and genial.” Its coloring includes that “matchless golden” tone for which Rembrandt had become so highly admired. The reporter suggested that this painting would not go into a private collection unless someone was willing to pay at least $50,000 or $60,000 for it (“Rembrandt’s ‘Gilder,’” p. 4). From this time on, Melville would have been attuned to any further information about this painting.
The next journalistic hint about the future disposition of Rembrandt’s Gilder came in this headline in the New York Times on December 9, 1888: “Two Rembrandts Bought by H. O. Havemeyer and also a Delacroix.” The two Rembrandts were the Van Beresteyn portraits that had arrived in the city in 1883. In addition to describing the large size, the high price, the visual content, and the artistic excellence of the Van Beresteyn portraits, the reporter for the Times conveyed Havemeyer’s expectation that “after the paintings had been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a while and certain matters had been concluded to his satisfaction, it is more than possible that they will be presented to the museum.” Havemeyer’s intent was to “offer the paintings as loans to the committee of the Metropolitan Museum,” leaving it to “members of that body whether the artists of New York should have the benefit of them” (p. 4). Havemeyer made a similar offer to the Museum after purchasing “Rembrandt’s Gilder” on March 7, 1889, leading to the exhibition of all three Rembrandt portraits, accompanied by the Delacroix and ten other paintings from his personal collection, in the Old Eastern Gallery, X from November 1890 to April 1891.
The portrait of Henry Doomer (fig. 4) is still considered one of the finest portraits Rembrandt ever painted of someone other than himself. It was certainly the one painting from the Havemeyer Collection that the Museum wanted to highlight in the Hand-Book for the Loan Collections exhibition in November 1890 and again in May 1891. As seen in figure 3 above, the painting was listed as “Portrait of a man about 45 years of age, commonly called ‘Rembrandt’s Gilder,’ (frame maker).” It was the only painting on that page of the Hand-Book to be described in more than a few lines; its seven lines on that page were followed by sixteen more on the next page.
Figure 4. Rembrandt. Henry Doomer, oil on wood (formerly known as Rembrandt’s Gilder), 1640. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Acquired in the Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929. Exhibited at the Old Eastern Gallery, November 1890 to November 1891.
After identifying the painting, the entry for The Gilder described the image in exacting detail:
Bust, life size, face turned three-quarter right, with moustache and chin whiskers, wearing a felt hat, small crown and wide brim turned up, soft falling ruffle, brown habit buttoned close, his right hand partly seen thrust through the mantle. Painted on panel, 21 ½ x 29 inches, signed ‘Rembrandt 1640.’
Following that came a detailed list of eight previous owners, from Anthony Cousin, Duke of Ancaster, in 1769 to all the way to William Schaus in 1884 and Henry O. Havemeyer in 1889, their names often accompanied by the date and price of the sale. The entry concluded with the names of engravers who had reproduced this portrait three different mediums: line engraving (M. Duplus), mezzotint (Dixon), and etching (Waltner) (Hand-Book no. 6, November 1890 to April 1891, pp. 15-16).
The Department of Painting at the Museum gave such detailed attention to this exceptional portrait in the hope that Havemeyer would donate it to the Museum. The three Rembrandts that went on display in November 1890, followed by the two that were added in May 1891, provided an excellent opportunity for Havemeyer and the Museum to each test the expectations and intentions of the other. Museum president Henry Marquand made his intention clear when he wrote to Museum director Luigi Cesnola: “if he gives us the Gilder he can keep the others to decorate his house.” This position did not sit well with Havemeyer, who took all five Rembrandts back to the privacy of his own home. He characteristically responded “to the Met rebuffs . . . by assembling an array of Rembrandts in a private home more spectacular than those at the museum” (Saltzman, Old Masters, New World, pp. 125-26).
Seeing five Rembrandts in one gallery during the last ten months of his life would have given Melville a wonderful capstone to a lifelong interest Rembrandt that began with paintings he saw at the National Gallery and the Rogers collection in London in 1849 and had further enriched during his visit to galleries in Amsterdam and Rotterdam in 1857. For the rest of his life, those face-to-face encounters with Rembrandt’s paintings had been supplemented by the engravings after Rembrandt he acquired for his own print collection, those further enriched by the engravings, commentary, and documentation from the life and career of Rembrandt in the copy of The Works of Eminent Masters he acquired in 1871 and in Mollett’s Rembrandt after 1882.
Published in 1854, the Works volume did not make any mention of Rembrandt’s Gilder, which had long been in private collections, but Mollett in 1882, drawing on Vosmaer from 1877, was up do date not only on the existence of the portrait, but the identity of the sitter and the color of the painting. Commenting on the “very remarkable portraits” that Rembrandt produced between 1640 and 1642, Mollett drew special attention to the one “known as ‘Le Doreur’" (translated as "The Gilder"). This painting was actually "a portrait of his friend the artist Domer, noted for the sunshine in his pictures; a portrait of great expression, displaying a wonderfully warm and golden colouring.” Mollett also included this painting in his “Chronological List of Rembrandt’s Paintings” under 1640: “Portrait of Domer, wrongly called ‘Le Doreur.’ Sold for 155,000 francs in 1865” (Mollett, Rembrandt, pp. 32, 90).
Standing face to face with Herman Doomer in the painting then still known as Rembrandt’s Gilder in the Old Eastern Gallery of the Metropolitan Museum, Melville would seen have an extremely well-preserved painting whose authenticity has never been challenged (see Liedtke in Rembrandt / Not Rembrandt in 1995, still marveling Rembrandt’s sophisticated handling of Doomer’s lace and face: ("Paintings," cat. 8, pp 58-61). Melville would have seen a Golden Age Dutch portrait whose texture and pose would have reminded him not only of portraits and self-portraits by Rembrandt and Rubens he had seen in his earlier travels, in his print collection, and in his book collection, but also of the 1870 portrait of himself by Joseph Eaton that was now in his own home (CAT 201 fig. 5).
Melville would also have seen the difference between the Doomer portrait at the height of Rembrandt’s career in 1840 and those he had painted eight years earlier, the 1832 Van Beresteyn portraits also on loan from Havemeyer in the same gallery.
In 1890 the male sitter was thought to be Christian John Van Beeresteyn, burgomaster of Delft, the female sitter his wife (see fig. 3, nos. 5, 8). In 2023, the Museum website suggested that the male sitter may instead have been Cornelis van Beresteyn, also a burgomeister of Delft, the female sitter his wife. Whichever Beresteyn burgomeister of Delft Rembrandt painted in 1632 (fig. 5 below), the pose, coloring, and expression were much more conventional and less vivid than in the image of Herman Doomer eight years later. One reason for this was Rembrandt’s growing sophistication as a painter. Another is the likelihood that the Beresteyn portraits in Delft were commissioned by sitters not well known to Rembrandt, whereas Herman Doomer was an esteemed friend of Rembrandt in Amsterdam, a skilled artisan who specialized in making cabinets using imported ebony.
Figure 5. Rembrandt. Portrait of a Man, probably of the Van Beresteyn Family, oil on canvas, 1632. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Acquired in the Bequest of Mrs. H. O Havemeyer, 1929. Exhibited in the Old Eastern Gallery, November 1890 - November 1891
Whichever Van Beresteyn burgomeister, along with his wife, Rembrandt may have painted in 1632, those two portraits, displayed near the 1640 portrait of “Rembrandt’s Gilder” in the Old Eastern Gallery of the Metropolitan Museum during the last year of Melville’s life would have taken his vision and imagination back to the Dutch culture from which his ancestor Herman Hermanse van Gansevoort emigrated in the late 1650s, passing by the young city of New York to settle on the future site of Albany.